Tom Harris (botanist)

Professor Thomas Maxwell Harris FRS^[1] (8 January 1903 – 1 May 1983)^[2] was an English paleobotanist.

Education and career

He was educated at Bootham School, York,^[3] Wyggeston School, Leicester, and University College, Nottingham, before continuing to complete his doctorate at Christ's College, Cambridge.^[2]

Tom Harris was a Palaeobotanist on East Greenland Geological Survey, 1926-27.^[4] He became a professor at the University of Reading in 1934,^[5] working in the botany department with Theodora Lisle Prankerd and Terrance Ingold.^[1] He was Head of the Department of Botany.^[6] At Reading he supervised William Chaloner and Winifred Pennington, both later professors of botany.^[6] The Harris Garden, located on the University of Reading's Whiteknights Campus, was named after him.^[7]

Harris was a Fellow of the Royal Society.^[1] He served as president of the Linnean Society of London from 1961 to 1964.

Awards

• 1968 Linnean Medal

Partial bibliography

• The Fossil Flora of Scoresby Sound East Greenland (Copenhagen, 1931).
• The British Rhaetic Flora (London, 1938).
• British Purbeck Charophyta (London, 1939).
• Liassic and Rhaetic Plants collected in 1936-38 from East Greenland, etc. (Copenhagen, 1946).
• Conifers of the Taxiodiaceæ from the Wealden Formation of Belgium, etc. (Brussels, 1953).
• The Yorkshire Jurassic flora (five volumes, London, 1961–1979).