Wilfred Norman Edwards FGS (13 June 1890 – 17 December 1956) was a British paleobotanist and keeper of geology at the Natural History Museum from 1938 to 1955 and was awarded the Lyell Medal in 1955.
During the First World War, he served with the Royal Army Medical Corps in the Balkans, and only returned to museum work in 1919.
[1] He was the first paleobotanist to be employed by the museum, and he worked on fossil plants for much of his career, publishing numerous papers and reports.
[8] Early in his career, Edwards recognised fossil plants in samples that had been collected during early geological expeditions to Antarctica; notably, the identification of leaves of the plant Glossopteris and fossil wood Rhexoxylon in samples collected by Hartley Ferrar from Victoria Land during the British Discovery Expedition of 1901 to 1904.
In his obituary, Edwards' colleague Maurice Wonnacott recounts how one collecting expedition in north Africa involved a 500 kilometre round-trip by camel from Touggourt to Tozeur.