Randolph Kirkpatrick

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Randolph Kirkpatrick (1863–1950) was a British scientist who studied sponges, Cnidaria, and bryozoans. He worked as the assistant keeper of lower invertebrates at the British Natural History Museum from 1886 until his retirement in 1927.

He published a small number of papers on sponges from Antarctica and the Indian Ocean. His most significant work was on Merlia, a coralline sponge with a coral-like limestone skeleton. He was the first to correctly interpret these unusual sponges, but his ideas were largely ignored until the 1960s, when Goreau, Hartman, and Jackson rediscovered coralline sponges in Caribbean reefs.

Kirkpatrick’s prominence was likely damaged by his unconventional ideas about the history of life on Earth, published in his self-published book The Nummulosphere (1912). In it, he argued that the Earth began entirely underwater and that large foraminifera called Nummulites formed a layer he named the Nummulosphere, from which all rocks were later derived. He even claimed to see nummulitic textures in granites and meteorites. In later years he admitted these ideas were wrong, saying he had been misled by “the architecture of protoplasm.”