[2] He was never associated with any institution, but worked from his home, initially near Stalham, Norfolk, but from 1928 at Boars Hill, outside Oxford.
[3] Later, Garstang's daughter married Alister Hardy, strengthening Gurney's connections with zoology.
[4] Gurney's first scientific work was a paper on metamorphosis in the crab Corystes cassivelaunus, which he published in 1902 while still an undergraduate at the University of Oxford.
[1][2] Gurney's two great study objects were the Copepoda and the larvae of Decapoda, and his greatest works were the three-volume monograph British Freshwater Copepoda, published by the Ray Society in 1931–1933, and his Larvae of Decapod Crustacea published by the Ray Society in 1942.
[3] Perhaps through the influence of Garstang, Gurney rejected Ernst Haeckel's biogenetic law (that "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny"), preferring Garstang's concept of paedomorphosis as an explanation for the similarities between copepods and decapod larvae.