Shirley Coryndon

Shirley Cameron Coryndon (1926–1976) was a British paleontologist and authority on fossil hippopotami.^[1]

In the 1950s she studied paleontology with Donald MacInnes at the Museum of Nairobi.^[2]

Coryndon was the palentological assistant to Louis Leakey at the Centre for Prehistory and Paleontology.^[3] She also participated in excavations at Olduvai Gorge. She was previously married to Roger Coryndon, son of colonial administrator Robert Coryndon,^[4] and in 1969 she married British paleontologist R. J. G. Savage, whom she had met in Kenya in 1955.^[1][5] She is commemorated in the names of the fossil hippopotami Hexaprotodon coryndonae^[6] and Kenyapotamus coryndonae,^[7] as well as the fossil bovine Ugandax coryndonae.^[8]

Books

• Leakey, L. S. B.; Savage, R. J. G.; Coryndon, S. C. (1973). Fossil Vertebrates of Africa. 3. New York & London: Academic Press.
• Savage, R. J. G.; Coryndon, S. C. (1976). Fossil Vertebrates of Africa. 4. New York & London: Academic Press.

References

1. Leakey, Richard E. (29 May 1998). "Obituary: Professor R. J. G. Savage". The Independent. Retrieved 2015-08-14.
2. Weedman, Kathryn (2001). "Who's "That Girl": British, South African, and American Women as Africanist Archaeologists in Colonial Africa (1860s–1960s)". African Archaeological Review. 18 (1): 16.
3. Virginia Morell (11 January 2011). Ancestral Passions: The Leakey Family and the Quest for Humankind's Beginnings. Simon and Schuster. pp. 229–. ISBN 978-1-4391-4387-2.
4. Richard E. Leakey; Bethwell A. Ogot (1980). "Shirley Coryndon Savage (1926–1977)". Proceedings of the 8th Panafrican Congress of Prehistory and Quaternary Studies: Nairobi, 5 to 10 September, 1977. International Louis Leakey Memorial Institute for African Prehistory. p. 8.
5. Benton, Michael (1998). "Obituary: Robert J. G. Savage (1927–1998)". Nature in Avon: Proceedings of the Bristol Naturalists' Society. 58: 14–18.
6. Geze, R. (1985). "Repartition paleoecologique et relations phylogenetiques des Hippopotamidae (Mammalia, Artiodactyla) du Neogene d'Afrique orientale". Environment des hominides au Plio-Pleistocene. Paris: Foundation Singer-Polignac. pp. 81–100.
7. Pickford, Martin (1983). "On the origins of Hippopotamidae togetherwith descriptions of two new species, a new genus and a new subfamily from the Miocene of Kenya". Geobios. 16 (2): 193–217. doi:10.1016/S0016-6995(83)80019-9.
8. Gentry, A. W. (2006). "A new bovine (Bovidae, Artiodactyla) from the Hadar Formation, Ethiopia". Transactions of the Royal Society of South Africa. 61 (2): 41–50. doi:10.1080/00359190609519952.

• Sutcliffe, A. (January 1977). "Obituary, Shirley Savage (nee Coryndon)". Newsletter of The Association of the William Pengelly Cave Research Centre (28): 26.