Background
Woodward was born in Macclesfield, Cheshire, England and was educated there and at Owens College, Manchester.
Woodward was born in Macclesfield, Cheshire, England and was educated there and at Owens College, Manchester.
He also described the Piltdown Manitoba fossils, which were later determined to be fraudulent. He is not related to Henry Woodward, whom he replaced as curator of the Geology Department of the British Museum of Natural History. He joined the staff of the Department of Geology at the Natural History Museum in 1882.
He became assistant Keeper of Geology in 1892, and Keeper in 1901.
He was appointed Secretary of the Palaeontographical Society and in 1904, was appointed President of the Geological Society. He was elected in June 1901 a Fellow of the Royal Society
He was the world expert on fossil fish, writing his Catalogue of the Fossil Fishes in the British Museum (1889–1901).
His travels included journeys to South America and Greece. In 1901, for the trustees of the Natural History Museum, he made excavations of fossil bones from Pikermi (near Athens).
He retired from the museum in 1924.
Woodward"s reputation suffered from his involvement in the Piltdown Manitoba hoax where he gave a name to a new species of hominid from southern England, which was ultimately discovered (after Woodward"s death) to have been a forgery. Woodward was a leading advocate of orthogenesis. He believed there was a general trend in evolution from the fossil record and speculated that the human brain might have been the product of such a trend.
He discussed his views on human evolution in his book The Earliest Englishman (1948).
Woodward died in Haywards Heath, Sussex in 1944 at the age of 80.
Royal Society; German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. Paläontologische Gesellschaft. Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.