Alan J. Charig
British paleontologist (1927–1997)
Alan Jack Charig (1 July 1927 – 15 July 1997) was an English palaeontologist and writer who popularised his subject on television and in books at the start of the wave of interest in dinosaurs in the 1970s.
Charig was, though, first and foremost a research scientist in the Department of Palaeontology at the Natural History Museum, London. There he worked on dinosaurs and their immediate Triassic ancestors, but also studied creatures as varied as limbless amphisbaenians (worm-lizards) and a Fijian gastropod, Thatcheria.
Biography
Charig was educated at The Haberdashers' Aske's Boys' School, an independent school (at that time in Hampstead), and Emmanuel College, Cambridge. His university education was interrupted by National Service in the Royal Armoured Corps, first as a tank driver and, after volunteering for an Inter-Services Russian language course at Cambridge, as a Russian interpreter in Germany, from 1946 to 1948.
On graduating in Zoology in 1951, Charig took a doctorate at Cambridge, supervised by the late Francis Rex Parrington. His subject was Triassic archosaurs of Tanganyika.
After a short spell as lecturer in Zoology in the Gold Coast (now Ghana), in 1957 Charig took up a post in Invertebrate palaeontology at the Natural History Museum. He remained at the museum for the rest of his career, becoming Curator of Fossil Reptiles and Birds in 1961, and Principal Scientific Officer in 1964.
Life at the museum suited Charig well.
“Alan J. Charig” enters the record as british paleontologist (1927–1997). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Alan, Charig and British can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2600494. VIAF identifies the subject as 79104990. The Library of Congress control number is n82159968. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1927, 1997, 1946 and 1948.
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This entry incorporates text from “Alan J. Charig” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.