13 Facts About Walter Garstang

Walter Garstang's best known works on marine larvae were his poems published as Larval Forms and Other Zoological Verses, especially The Ballad of the Veliger.

Walter Garstang is noted for his hypothesis on chordate evolution, known as Garstang's theory, which suggests an alternative route for chordate evolution from echinoderms.

Walter Garstang was born on 9 February 1868 as the eldest son of Dr Walter Garstang of Blackburn and his wife Matilda Mary Wardley, and older brother of the archaeologist John Garstang.

Between 1902 and 1907, Walter Garstang was employed by the MBA as the principal investigator working on North Sea fisheries.

Walter Garstang helped to establish a fisheries laboratory in Lowestoft that was later to become the Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science, part of the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food.

Walter Garstang instigated a series of detailed fisheries surveys throughout the southern North Sea aboard the RV Huxley, under the auspices of the newly formed International Council for the Exploration of the Sea.

Walter Garstang was Professor of Zoology at the University of Leeds from 1907 to 1933.

The Walter Garstang Building at the university is named in his honour.

Walter Garstang argued that ontogeny creates [aspects of] phylogeny, in that embryonic development puts constraints on evolution, favoring particular evolutionary outcomes while excluding others.

Walter Garstang made the radical suggestion that the chordates evolved from the larvae of another group, whether the larvae of hemichordates or of echinoderms, by progenesis.

Walter Garstang's idea has been expanded and is supported by many lines of evidence.

The hypothesis, which Walter Garstang proposed in the early 20th century, seemed far-fetched at the time of its conception and did not receive support until after Walter Garstang's death.

Only a few months before he died Walter Garstang had drafted a communication to Nature to put forward his latest suggestion that Amphioxus might be regarded as a paedomorphic ammocoete-like larva of a Cyclostome; it was never sent, because the day on which he was to have posted it he found that the whole of his idea had recently and quite independently been published by the great Stensio.