Antarctic Zoology Loses Two Stalwarts: Dick Laws and Bernard Stonehouse

Closely following the news of the death of Dick Laws on 7 October, I saw the notice in The Times this week that Barnard Stonehouse had died on 12 November. Both started out with the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey in the late 1940s and Dick later became Director of the successor body, the British Antarctic Survey. Both were born in 1926.

For followers of this blog, Bernard Stonehouse collected a series of Emperor Penguin embryos in 1949, as I described in In Search of a Penguin’s Egg. Why?...What happened to Nelson Norman's 1959 embryos? on 3 July this year.

FIDS and BAS, to my certain knowledge, exemplifies spirit of scientific collaboration that I hope continues. Workers in Antarctica could not have been more helpful in collecting, storing and bringing back material.

Dick told me that I must go to the Antarctic. I did. He was right.

Heading south to the Lemaire Channel. 30 January 2005