Person

Whitelegge, Thomas (1850 - 1927)

Born
7 August 1850
Stockport, Cheshire, England
Died
4 August 1927
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
Occupation
Bryologist, Marine zoologist and Zoological collector

Summary

Thomas Whitelegge arrived in Sydney in 1883 and after several years working as a plasterer and in a brewery found temporary employment at the Australian Museum. In 1887 he became Senior Scientific Assistant in charge of lower invertebrates. Whitelegge published extensively on marine invertebrates (Crustaceae, Echinodermata, sponges, corals, jellyfish, Annelida) and particularly those of New South Wales and of the 1896 Royal Society expedition to Funafuti, and on the Crustaceae and sponges from the Thetis expedition. He resigned from the Museum in 1908. Whitelegge was also an authority on Australian mosses which he collected widely in New South Wales and, with Robert Etheridge, on Norfolk Island. With William Watts he published the first substantial catalog of Australian frondose mosses. Several hundreds of his bryophyte collections are in the National Herbariums of New South Wales and Victoria.

Skip to

Details

Chronology

1883
Life event - Migrated to New South Wales
1883 - 1887
Career position - Cataloger of marine invertebrates, Australian Museum
1887 - 1908
Career position - Senior Scientific Assistant in charge of lower invertebrates, Australian Museum
1888
Career event - Original [founding] member, Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science
1889
Award - Royal Society of New South Wales Medal
1890 - 1896
Career position - Member of Council, Linnean Society of New South Wales
1896 - 1927
Award - Fellow, Royal Microscopical Society, London

Related Awards

Related Corporate Bodies

Archival resources

Adolph Basser Library, Australian Academy of Science

  • Australian Botanists - Biographies, MS 064; Adolph Basser Library, Australian Academy of Science. Details

Mitchell and Dixson Libraries Manuscripts Collection, State Library of New South Wales

  • Thomas Whitelegge - Records, 1884 - 1911, Uncatalogued MSS set 439; Mitchell and Dixson Libraries Manuscripts Collection, State Library of New South Wales. Details

Published resources

Books

  • Whitelegge, T., Report on sponges from the coastal beaches of New South Wales (Sydney: [s.n.], 1902), 70 & [24] pp. Details

Book Sections

Journal Articles

  • McNeil, F. A., 'Thomas Whitelegge, 1850-1927', Records of the Australian Museum, xvii (1929), 265-277. Details
  • Watts, W. W.; and Whitelegge, T., 'Census muscorum australiensium: a classified catalogue of the frondose mosses of Australia and Tasmania, collated from available publications and herbarium records [part I]', Proceedings of the Linnean Society of New South Wales, 27 (supp. to pt 3) (1902), 1-90. Details
  • Watts, W. W.; and Whitelegge, T., 'Census muscorum australienisum: a classified catalogue of the frondose mosses of Australia and Tasmania, collated from available publications and herbarium records [part II]', Proceedings of the Linnean Society of New South Wales, 30 (supp. to pt 4) (1906), 91-163. Details
  • Whitelegge, T., 'List of the marine and freshwater invertebrate fauna of Port Jackson and the neighbourhood', Journal and proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales, 23 (2) (1889), 163-323. Details

Resources

See also

  • Beechey, D. L., 'Sydney's Molluscs: from Gentlemen to Malacologists' in The Natural History of Sydney, Lunney, Daniel, Hutchings, Pat A. and Hochuli, Dieter, eds (Mosman, N.S.W.: Royal Zoological Society of New South Wales, 2010), pp. 107-24. Details
  • George, Alex S., Australian botanist's companion (Kardinya, W.A.: Four Gables Press, 2009), 671 pp. Details

Gavan McCarthy [P004098] and Helen Cohn

Created: 20 October 1993, Last modified: 6 October 2023

EOAS ID: biogs/P000894b.htm

Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
What do we mean by this?

Published by Swinburne University of Technology.
This Edition: 2024 November (Ballambar - Gariwerd calendar - early summer - season of butterflies)
Reference: http://www.bom.gov.au/iwk/calendars/gariwerd.shtml#ballambar
For earlier editions see the Internet Archive at: https://web.archive.org/web/*/www.eoas.info

The Encyclopedia of Australian Science and Innovation uses the Online Heritage Resource Manager (OHRM), a relational data curation and web publication system developed by the eScholarship Research Centre and its predecessors at the University of Melbourne 1999-2020. The OHRM has been maintained by Gavan McCarthy since 2020.

Cite this page: https://www.eoas.info/biogs/P000894b.htm

"... the rengitj, as a visible mark or imprint on the land, is characterised as a place of origin, the repository of all names, as well as a kind of mapped visual expression of the connection between people and places which is to be carried out in the temporal sequence of the journey." Fanca Tamisari (1998) 'Body, Vision and Movement: In the footprints of the ancestors'. Oceania 68(4) p260