Robert Alfred Cloyne Godwin-Austen

Robert Alfred Cloyne Godwin-Austen FRS (17 March 1808 – 25 November 1884) was an English geologist.

His attention was next directed to the Cretaceous rocks of Surrey, his home county - his estates being situated at Chilworth and Shalford near Guildford.

In 1855 he brought before the Geological Society of London his paper On the possible Extension of the Coal-Measures beneath the South-Eastern part of England, in which he pointed out on well-considered theoretical grounds the likelihood of coal measures being some day reached in that area.

In this article he also advocated the freshwater origin of the Old Red Sandstone, and discussed the relations of that formation, and of the Devonian, to the Silurian and Carboniferous.

in 1849, and in 1862 he was awarded the Wollaston Medal by the Geological Society of London, on which occasion he was styled by Roderick Murchison pre-eminently the physical geographer of bygone periods.