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 In 1884, Arthur Smith Woodward first met Charles Dawson, a solicitor and industrious amateur collector, antiquarian, geologist, archaeologist and palaeontologist. This began a long association and friendship centred on their mutual interest in palaeontology and human evolution. Dawson devised a complicated plot focused around the ancient river gravel deposits at Barkham Manor near the village of Piltdown, Sussex. In these gravels he planted stone tools and fossil mammal remains together with the lower jaw of an ape and numerous modern human cranial bones to deceive the scientific establishment into believing an early human ancestor had been found in his own back yard. Cleverly devised to provide anatomists and archaeologists with evidence for concepts that they wanted to believe were true, Dawson fuelled numerous contentious debates among scientists that quickly attracted international attention. Nothing could be more unfortunate than such a respectable scientist as Arthur Smith Woodward being taken in by the events of 1912, and then subsequently swept along by them well into his retirement right up to the time of his death in 1944.

Abstract In the pioneering century of Australian geology the ‘BM’ (British Museum (Natural History): now NHMUK) London played a major role in assessing the palaeontology and stratigraphical relations of samples sent across long distances by local men, both professional and amateur. Eighteen-year-old Arthur Woodward (1864–1944) joined the museum in 1882, was ordered to change his name and was catapulted into vertebrate palaeontology, beginning work on Australian fossils in 1888. His subsequent career spanned six decades across the nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries and, although Smith (renamed to distinguish him from NHMUK colleagues) Woodward never visited Australia, he made significant contributions to the study of Australian fossil fishes and other vertebrates. ‘ASW’ described Australian and Antarctic Palaeozoic to Quaternary fossils in some 30 papers, often deciding or confirming the age of Australasian rock units for the first time, many of which have contributed to our understanding of fish evolution. Smith Woodward’s legacy to vertebrate palaeontology was blighted by one late middle-age misjudgement, which led him away from his first-chosen path. ASW’s work, especially on palaeoichthyology with his four-part Catalogue of Fossil Fishes , was one of the foundations for vertebrate palaeontology in Australia; it continues to resonate, and influenced subsequent generations via his unofficial student Edwin Sherbon Hills. Some taxa, however, have never been revisited.