Finlay Lorimer Kitchin, British geologist and palaeontologist, studied geology and
palaeontology at St. John’s College, Cambridge, from 1890 to 1894. Soon after
leaving Cambridge he went to the University of Munich, where he started
research in palaeontology and was awarded the PhD degree in 1897. The University of Cambridge later awarded him the degree Doctor of Science (ScD, 1923). After
working for a short time unofficially in the British Museum (Natural History)
he was appointed assistant palaeontologist to the Geological Survey in 1898. In
1905 he was promoted to palaeontologist.
Kitchin's doctoral research at Munich dealt with the Jurassic fauna of Cutch (now in Pakistan) and led to two papers. One of these, "The Brachiopoda", was published in a Memoir of the Geological Survey of India; the other, "The Jurassic fauna of Cutch", (Nature, 1903/4), dealt with the mollusc genus Trigonia, which also occurs in South African Cretaceous deposits. A few years later he turned his attention to South Africa and studied the fossils of the Uitenhage Group. A preliminary report appeared in the Geological Magazine in 1907, but his main publication on this work, "The invertebrate fauna and palaeontological relation of the Uitenhage Series", was published in the Annals of the South African Museum (Vol. 7(2), pp. 21-250) in 1908.
Later Kitchin co-authored publications on the mesozoic rocks and coalfield of Kent, England (1911 and 1923) in collaboration with G.W. Lamplugh*, and, among others, published a paper "On the age of the upper and middle dinosaur deposits at Tendaguru, Tanganyika Territory" (Geological Magazine, 1929). In 1928 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London.
