Abstract Arthur Smith Woodward commanded international respect and acclaim. He was honoured in scientific circles from Russia to the Americas and throughout Europe, particularly for his outstanding work on fossil fish. He was distinguished in both his exceptional abilities as a vertebrate palaeontologist and in his tall, authoritative presence. He appeared confident, contained and in control, while his intellectual gifts had been apparent from a very early age. He was a remarkable scientist, but a man whose reputation has for too long been seen through the prism of the Piltdown forgery.

Abstract When an 18-year-old Arthur Smith Woodward arrived at the new home of the natural history collections of the British Museum on Cromwell Road, South Kensington in August 1882, he could not have envisaged the treasure trove of vertebrate fossils that awaited him. Even before the move to South Kensington, the collections already contained many fossil fish specimens first described and figured by the famous Swiss zoologist and geologist Louis Agassiz in his monumental work Recherches sur les Poissons Fossiles . The fabulous fossil fish collections of Lord Egerton and the Earl of Enniskillen arrived shortly after, including many more of Agassiz’s type specimens. However, Agassiz had left much work undone and ideas on fossil fish systematics had changed in the 50 years since he had started publishing his research. Making full use of the collection, and adding to it, Smith Woodward embarked on a scientific career that was to see him become the world’s leading authority on fossil fishes. When he retired from the Museum at the age of 60, his successors inherited the most extensive and well-documented collection of fossil fishes in the world.

Abstract Four years after joining the Natural History Department of the British Museum in 1882, Arthur Smith Woodward published his first taxonomic paper erecting three new species based on sharks’ teeth. He retired from the Natural History Museum in 1924 but continued to publish until his death in 1944 at the age of 80. In total he named 321 new fossil fishes, a remarkable achievement, marking him out as the most influential palaeoichthyologist of his time. For the first time brief details of all his type specimens are brought together, accompanied in many cases by high-quality photographic images, in an online format readily available to anyone with access to the Internet. Supplementary material: Details of all the Smith Woodward type specimens, including images, are available at http://www.geolsoc.org.uk/SUP18874

Abstract When Sir Arthur Smith Woodward began to lose his sight around 1940, his wife Maud persuaded him to record his memoirs. When he died in 1944, they were incomplete and Lady Smith Woodward added her own reminiscences to them with a view to having the whole published. It was not, and the manuscript was donated to the Museum by their daughter Margaret in 1966. These ‘Memories’ are now being made available online for the first time. They provide an invaluable insight into the lives of this eminent scientist and his wife, his constant companion through 50 years of marriage. Supplementary material: Lady Smith Woodward’s original typed manuscript has been transcribed, with footnotes and a few illustrations added. It is available at: www.geolsoc.org.uk/SUP18867