LOWER LIAS OF ROBIN HOOD'S BAY 



83 



Fig. 2 The Robin Hood's Bay foreshore at low tide, looking north-west from the top of Ravenscar (above Peak) at the south-eastern end of the bay. Robin 

 Hood's Bay town is immediately above the foreshore in the centre-right of the photograph. M.K. Howarth photograph. 28 September 1999. 



collected with sufficient accuracy to enable the sequences of ammo- 

 nite 'hemerae' to be compared at the north-western and south-eastern 

 ends of Robin Hood's Bay. Initially the project was intended to be a 

 thesis for a higher degree at Cambridge University, but the detailed 

 mapping, bed-by-bed description and collecting during 1928-1930 

 were submitted as a dissertation in support of a fellowship applica- 

 tion at King's College in late 1930. This was not successful, and 

 Bairstow was preparing for a second application in 1931, when the 

 offer of a permanent post at The Natural History Museum in South 

 Kensington (then the British Museum (Natural History)), with the 

 opportunity to continue work indefinitely on the Lower Lias of 

 Robin Hood's Bay, appealed to him more than a fellowship at 

 Cambridge of six years duration. In fact, during his early years at the 

 Museum he was elected to a three-year visiting Fellowship at King's 

 College in 1 932-35 . He started at the Museum in October 1 93 1 , and 

 although initially put in charge of fossil echinoderms and later 

 Coleoidea (including belemnites), he was able to continue work on 

 Robin Hood's Bay until his retirement in June 1 965. He continued to 

 work at the Museum until 1985, when he moved to Todmorden, 

 Yorkshire, where he died on 10 August 1995. 



The meticulous attention to detail that Bairstow lavished on the 

 description, collecting and mapping of the Lower Lias of Robin 

 Hood's Bay, made it unlikely that he would produce a final descrip- 

 tion with which he would be satisfied. It is fortunate, therefore, that 

 for the Cambridge fellowship dissertation of 1930 he produced a 

 finished manuscript version of the map and a stratigraphical descrip- 

 tion of the whole succession, which are the basis of the present paper. 

 His most useful collecting occurred during the period 1928-34, and 

 work during the following 40 years did not greatly enhance that 

 original burst of activity. His ammonite collection of about 2,360 



specimens is housed in The Natural History Museum, and is a prime 

 record of the sequence of ammonite faunas for the upper two-thirds 

 of the Lower Lias. Such a collection would be difficult to repeat 

 today, because so many of the accessible ammonites have been 

 removed from the Bay. Bairstow conducted field parties to the Bay 

 for the 18th International Geological Congress in 1948 and the 

 William Smith Jurassic Symposium in 1 969, and gave brief summa- 

 ries of the zonal sequence and his bed numbering in the guide books 

 for those meetings (Bairstow, 1948, 1969). Apart from a summary in 

 a guide to the fossils of the Scarborough district (Bairstow, 1953), he 

 left no other published account. 



The geological map of Robin Hood's Bay, the description of the 

 stratigraphy and basic biostratigraphy formed the first half of his 

 dissertation for the fellowship at King's College, Cambridge, in 

 1930. The second half of that dissertation consisted of a description 

 of the Lower Lias belemnites of Robin Hood's Bay, and included an 

 assessment of the 19 specific names proposed by Simpson (1855: 

 22-3 1 ; 1 884: 47-54) and partly revised by Phillips ( 1 863-1 909), for 

 belemnites from the bay. This part of his work was also destined 

 never to be published, but it did give Bairstow an interest in belemnites 

 and related groups, which led to him being put in charge of fossil 

 Coleoidea at the Natural History Museum. In fact, he did much 

 valuable investigation into the early generic nomenclature of fossil 

 Coleoidea, especially the non-belemnite groups, and his detailed 

 notes were passed on first to Dr J. A. Jeletzky, then to later Treatise 

 authors, for incorporation in the Coleoid volume of the Treatise on 

 Invertebrate Paleontology (not yet published). In these and other 

 matters, especially the geology of Robin Hood's Bay and general 

 identification of specimens sent to the Museum, colleagues found 

 him helpful and were always enlightened by his views. He had a long 



