Reverend Peter Bellinger Brodie (27 January 1815–1 November 1897)

British clergyman and geologist. Brodie was born at Lincoln's Inn Fields, London, the first child of the barrister Peter Bellinger Brodie (1778-1854) and his first wife, Elizabeth Mary (d. 1823). Brodie displayed an early interested in natural history and regularly attended meetings of the Geological Society of London in Somerset House, and visited the Royal College of Surgeons at a time when William Clift was curator. Clift recommended he be elected a fellow of the Geological Society. Brodie studied at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he attended lectures in geology by Adam Sedgwick (1785-1873). He was awarded his BA degree in 1838 and MA in 1842. In 1887 he was awarded the Murchison medal by the Geological Society of London. In 1853 he became a member of Warwickshire Natural History and Archaeological Society and a year later he founded its field club. He was active in every aspect of the society's work, leading field trips, writing papers, serving on committees, and donating hundreds of fossils to the museum. Brodie became an expert on fossil insects and published a book entitled A History of the Fossil Insects in the Secondary Rocks of England. In 1886 he was Vice President of the Warwickshire Naturalists' and Archaeologists' Field Club. Brodie named various new species of fossils including the little ostracod Cypris liassica from the Avicula contorta zone of the Lower Lias. In 1841 he married Isabella Octavia Baker with whom he had one daughter and five sons. Brodie was ordained deacon at Salisbury Cathedral on 23 December 1838 and ordained priest on 22 December the following year. He was elected curate to the Revd. Francis Baker (1773-1840), rector of Wylye, Wiltshire, in 1838, and between 1840 and 1853 he worked in Buckinghamshire, Gloucestershire, and Warwickshire. His final move was to Rowington, Warwickshire, in 1853, when he was instituted vicar of St Lawrence's Church. He died at home on 1 November 1897, and was buried alongside his wife and two of his sons in Rowington churchyard. His insect collections are mostly in the Natural History Museum, London; others are in the collections of the B.G.S. Keyworth, Warwick County Museum, Dorset County Museum, Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution, Gloucester City Museum, and the University of Vienna.