Presentation of the 2010 Harrell L. Strimple Award of the Paleontological Society to J. S. H. “Joe” Collins

This evening, it is an honor and delight to present to you Mr. J. S. H. Collins, known universally as Joe, who is the 2010 recipient of the Harrell L. Strimple Award. Joe was born within the sound of Bow Bells and brought up in London, and a worse place to develop an interest in field paleontology is hard to imagine. Favorite trips into town as a schoolboy included visits to the British Museum (Natural History) and Geological Museum in South Kensington. When he was ten years old, Joe was presented with his first book on paleontology, Webster Smith's ‘The World in its Past’ (1931). Finally, a school trip to Lyme Regis in 1939 gave young naturalist Joe his first taste of collecting fossils, one he enjoyed. Meanwhile, across the North Sea, Adolf Hitler was (inadvertently) doing what he could to encourage Joe's collecting. Evacuation to a small village near Liphook in Hampshire on the outbreak of war allowed Joe to further pursue his interests in natural history, mainly in entomology. After the war, Joe was in the Royal Navy for 16 days before being discharged ‘visually unfit for naval service’, a strange pronouncement for a man whose descriptions of fossil crustaceans abound with minute observations. Joe then worked for the Wellcome Foundation as an animal technologist in the Immunology and Histopathological departments for 21 years. From 1967 he owned a secondhand bookshop, specializing in natural history, from which he retired in 1989. All the while he was developing his interest in paleontology, and particularly decapod and cirripede crustaceans, the first specimens of which he collected from the Cretaceous Gault Clay in 1947. S.K.D. has been corresponding and working with the awardee since the late 1980s, so he reckons to know Joe's abilities and achievements well. Joe Collins has made an …