born March 22, 1785, Dent, Yorkshire, Eng.
died Jan. 27, 1873, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire
English geologist.
A pioneer in the establishment of geology as a university discipline (Trinity College, Oxford), he named the Cambrian Period and (with Roderick Murchison) the Devonian Period . His grandnephew, the zoologist Adam Sedgwick (1854–1913), first established the evolutionary link between the annelids and the arthropods.