18 Facts About Alister Hardy

Alister Hardy had the artistic skill to illustrate his books with his own drawings, maps, diagrams, and paintings.

Alister Hardy was born in Nottingham, the son of Richard Alister Hardy, an architect, and his wife, Elizabeth Hannah Clavering.

Alister Hardy was educated not far away at Oundle School.

Alister Hardy had intended to go to Oxford University in 1914, but on the outbreak of war he instead volunteered for the army, and was made a camoufleur, a camouflage officer.

Alister Hardy was selected for camouflage work by the artist Solomon J Solomon, who apparently mistook him for a different Hardy who was a professional artist.

Alister Hardy however did have sufficient artistic skill to serve his military and scientific work.

Alister Hardy illustrated his New Naturalist books with his own line drawings, maps, diagrams, photographs, and paintings.

Alister Hardy described the camoufleurs as including artists and "scientists with artistic inclinations", himself perhaps among them.

In later life, Alister Hardy travelled in India, Sri Lanka, Burma, Cambodia, China and Japan, recording his visits to temples in all those countries in watercolour paintings.

Alister Hardy was the zoologist on the RRS Discovery voyage to explore the Antarctic between 1925 and 1927, as part of the Discovery Investigations.

Alister Hardy's pioneering research into plankton distribution and abundance is continued by the Continuous Plankton Recorder Survey.

In 1940, Alister Hardy was made a Fellow of the Royal Society.

Alister Hardy identified as a Darwinian, he denied the Lamarckian inheritance of acquired characteristics.

Alister Hardy was a proponent of organic selection.

Alister Hardy held the view that behavioral changes can be important for evolution.

In 1930, while reading Wood Jones' Man's Place among the Mammals, which included the question of why humans, unlike all other land mammals, had fat attached to their skin, Alister Hardy realized that this trait sounded like the blubber of marine mammals, and began to suspect that humans had ancestors that were more aquatic than previously imagined.

Alister Hardy wrote numerous scientific papers on plankton, fish and whales.

Alister Hardy wrote two popular books in the New Naturalist series, and in later life he wrote on religion.