Francis Rex Parrington (20 February 1905 – 17 April 1981) was a British vertebrate palaeontologist and comparative anatomist at the University of Cambridge.
[7] In 1958 he was awarded Doctor of Science at the University of Cambridge; in 1962 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society; in 1963 he was appointed Reader in Vertebrate Zoology.
He was President of the Zoology Section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and in 1972 he was elected an Honorary (Life) Member of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology.
[9] During his expeditions to the Middle Triassic Manda Beds of Tanzania during the 1930s, Parrington discovered the earliest known dinosaur or dinosauriform reptile, dating to 243 million years ago, Nyasasaurus parringtoni.
Nyasasaurus parringtoni was published in 2012 by Sterling Nesbitt, a palaeontologist at the University of Washington in Seattle and his colleagues, and Charig was posthumously included as co-author.