Martin Alister Campbell Hinton FRS (29 June 1883 – 3 October 1961) was a British

zoologist Zoology ()The pronunciation of zoology as is usually regarded as nonstandard, though it is not uncommon. is the branch of biology that studies the animal kingdom, including the structure, embryology, evolution, classification, habits, and d ...

Career

Hinton joined the staff of the

Natural History Museum A natural history museum or museum of natural history is a scientific institution with natural history scientific collection, collections that include current and historical records of animals, plants, Fungus, fungi, ecosystems, geology, paleon ...

in 1910, working on

mammal Mammals () are a group of vertebrate animals constituting the class Mammalia (), characterized by the presence of mammary glands which in females produce milk for feeding (nursing) their young, a neocortex (a region of the brain), fu ...

s, in particular

rodent Rodents (from Latin , 'to gnaw') are mammals of the order Rodentia (), which are characterized by a single pair of continuously growing incisors in each of the upper and lower jaws. About 40% of all mammal species are rodents. They are ...

s. He became Deputy Keeper of Zoology in 1927 and Keeper in 1936, retiring in 1945. Hinton is among those associated with the

Piltdown Man The Piltdown Man was a paleoanthropological fraud in which bone fragments were presented as the fossilised remains of a previously unknown early human. Although there were doubts about its authenticity virtually from the beginning, the remains ...

hoax, a composite of an altered human skull and ape jawbone planted, and subsequently 'discovered', at a dig in Piltdown, England, and presented as a missing link between man and ape. A trunk belonging to Hinton left in storage at the Natural History Museum and found in 1970 contained animal bones and teeth carved and stained in a manner similar to the Piltdown finds, and raising questions about Hinton's involvement in the deception.

References

External links

Web pages and timeline about the Piltdown forgery hosted by the British Geological Survey
English zoologists 1883 births 1961 deaths Employees of the Natural History Museum, London Fellows of the Royal Society 20th-century British zoologists {{UK-zoologist-stub