Roger Mason (geologist)

Roger Mason (born 4 May 1941) is an English geologist who is best known as the discoverer of the original type fossil, Charnia masoni, of a Precambrian (more than 540 million years old) organism that is part of the Ediacaran biota.

Mason grew up in the English Midlands city of Leicester, where he attended Wyggeston Boys’ Grammar School.

Mason credits this first event of his geological career to "[his] father’s encouragement and the enquiring approach fostered by [his] science teachers".

[2] Mason acknowledges, and the museum's Charnia display explains, that the fossil had been discovered a year earlier by Negus, "but no one took her seriously".

Attenborough, a keen fossil hunter as a boy, mentioned that he attended Wyggeston a few years prior to Mason, and had been in the same part of Charnwood a few years before Mason, but the prevailing wisdom at the time was that the rocks were too old to bear fossils and so Attenborough did not search for them.