Harry Govier Seeley

See also: Seeley

Harry Govier Seeley (February 18th 1839 - January 8th 1909) is a British paleontologist. Seeley becomes assistant with Adam Sedgwick with the Musée Woodwardian of Cambridge in 1859. He worked later for the British Museum and the Geological Survey off Britain and finally in 1872 with the King' S College after being himself married. He worked then for other Colleges of London.

Whereas the Dinosaure S were classified according to the structure of their feet and the shape of their teeth, Seeley is famous to have emitted the assumption of the existence of the two great groups of dinosaurs, the Saurischia and the Ornithischia by underlining the differences on the level of the osseous Bassin. This discovery was published in 1887 but its results in a conference in 1888. The classification proposed by Seeley was quickly adopted and is always regarded as valid. Seeley discovered, described and named many dinosaurs during its career for example, 11 are allotted to him: Agrosaurus (1891), Anoplosaurus (1878), Aristosuchus (1887), Craterosaurus (1874), Macrurosaurus (1869), Orthomerus (1883), Priodontognathus (1875), Rhadionsaurus (1881), and Thecospondylus (1882).

The descendants of the Saurischia (term which derives from lizard with ischion) are the Oiseau X and not of the Ornithischia (term which derives from the Greek bird to ischion) according to the the allowed theory. This testifies to a bad interpretation of Seeley. It found the two groups so distinct that it was in favor of a separated origin, but this theory was invalidated in the Années 1980 at the time of the development of novel methods of analysis Cladistique which showed that the two groups have ancestors common to the Trias. In Dragons off the Air (1901), Seeley did it parallel between the birds and the Ptérosaures. This work was sold very well.

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