The first Australian palynologist: Isabel Clifton Cookson (1893–1973) and her scientific work

Why a new volume on non-pollen palynomorphs?

“…Raistrick, along with his collaborator Kathleen Blackburn, continued work on palynology ranging from Quaternary to Carboniferous studies after his move to Newcastle; a key addition in terms of NPP research was their confirmation that the Carboniferous algae noted by Thiessen many years earlier were indeed Botryococcus, and indistinguishable from their modern counterparts (Marshall, 2005). Again, during the same period in the mid-1920s, I. Cookson was in residence in Britain, first at Imperial College London, then at the University of Manchester (Dettmann, 1993;Riding and Dettmann 2013); it is likely that she, too, was catalysed by lectures from Erdtman and Thiessen, although her interest in fossil plants and fungi was already developing: Cookson was trained as a modern botanist and mycologist in Australia, but turned her attention to palaeobotany and palaeomycology while in the UK; this collaboration produced many notable works, most importantly her seminal paper on Cenozoic fungi (1947).…”

A biography and obituary of Svein B. Manum (1926–2015)

“…However, Cookson had not been particularly active in palaeobotany for some years, and now concentrated virtually exclusively on palynology. Like most palynologists at this time, she had begun by studying terrestrial palynomorphs but, in the early 1950s, had turned her attention to marine palynology (Cookson 1953;Riding & Dettmann 2013). Isabel preferred to discuss palynology with Svein, rather than talk about early land plants with Arbo Høeg.…”

‘The man who vacuum cleaned the Atlantic’ − the aerosol collector and Gunnar Erdtman’s attempts to measure pollen rain

“…As such, this is also seen as a further contribution to the history of palynology and more widely to the historiography of the field, ocean and aerobiological sciences (cf. Manten 1966; Sarjeant 2002; Birks 2005; Edlund and Winthrop 2014; Riding and Dettmann 2014; Edwards et al 2017; Birks and Berglund 2018; De Klerk 2018; Edwards 2018, 2021; Edwards and Pardoe 2018; Gaillard et al 2018; Troels-Smith et al 2018; Edwards and Mao 2021; Charenko 2022; Hooghiemstra and Richards 2022).…”