William Thomas Blanford (7 October 183223 June 1905) was an English geologist and naturalist. He is best remembered as the editor of a major series on The Fauna of British India, Including Ceylon and Burma. Biography Blanford was born in London to William Blanford and Elizabeth Simpson. His father owned a factory next to their house on Bouverie street, Whitefriars. He was educated in private schools in Brighton (until 1846) and Paris (1848). He joined his family business in carving and gilding and studied at the School of Design in Somerset House. Suffering from ill health, he spent two years in a business house at Civitavecchia owned by a friend of his father. His initial aim was to enter a mercantile career. On returning to England in 1851 he was induced to enter the newly established Royal School of Mines (now part of Imperial College London), which his younger brother Henry F. Blanford (1834–1893), afterwards head of the Indian Meteorological Department, had already joined. He studied under Henry De la Beche, Lyon Playfair, Edward Forbes, Ramsay, and Warington Smyth. He then spent a year in the mining school (Bergakademie) at Freiberg, Saxony, and towards the close of 1854 both he and his brother obtained posts on the Geological Survey of India. In that service he remained for twenty-seven years, retiring in 1882. After his retirement he took up editorship of The Fauna of British India, Including Ceylon and Burma series. He was engaged in various parts of India, in the Raniganj coalfield, in Bombay, and in the coalfield near Talcher, where boulders considered to have been ice-borne were found in the Talcher strata (Talchir tillite)—a remarkable discovery confirmed by subsequent observations of other geologists in equivalent strata (Permian) elsewhere across Gondwanaland. Blanford took an interest in the Permo-Triassic Glossopteris flora. He commented on the geological age of this region in his much later address to the British Association in 1884. Between 1857 and 1860 he was involved in a survey of the Rajniganj coalfields, followed by visits to Trichinopoly and the Nilgiri Hills. In 1860 he went to Burma to study an extinct volcano, Puppadoung and in 1862 he took an interest in the Deccan Traps. In 1867 he joined an expedition to Abyssinia, the results of which were published in Observation on the Geology and Zoology of Abyssinia (1870). accompanying the army to Magdala and back; and in 1871–1872