Portal:Crustaceans/Selected biography/9

Robert Gurney (July 31, 1879 – March 5, 1950) was a British zoologist most famous for his monographs on British Freshwater Copepoda (1931–1933) and the Larvae of Decapod Crustacea (1942). He was born in 1879 as the fourth son of John Gurney and Isabel Charlotte Gurney (later Baroness Talbot de Malahide) of Sprowston Hall, Norfolk. He went to school at Eton College, and went on to study at New College, Oxford, graduating with first class honours in 1902. He was never associated with any institution, but worked from his home, initially in Norfolk, but later at Boars Hill. Realising the need for a specialist field station for freshwater biology to match the marine biological stations at Plymouth and Naples, Robert and his brother Eustace set up Great Britain's first freshwater laboratory at Sutton Broad. Gurney's two great study objects were the Copepoda and the larvae of Decapoda (zoea larva of Homarus gammarus pictured), and his greatest works were the three-volume monograph British Freshwater Copepoda, published by the Ray Society in 1931–1933, and his Larvae of Decapod Crustacea published by the Ray Society in 1942. Gurney travelled to North Africa and Bermuda, and received material from other foreign expeditions, including the Terra Nova Expedition (1910–1913) and the Discovery Investigations of the 1920s and 1930s.