Sir Frederick McCoy (1817 – 13 May 1899), was an Irish palaeontologist, zoologist, and museum administrator, active in Australia. He is noted for founding the Botanic Garden of the University of Melbourne in 1856. Early life McCoy was the son of Simon McCoy and was born in Dublin; some sources have his year of birth as 1823, however 1817 is the most likely. He was educated in Dublin and at Cambridge for the medical profession. Palaeontology career McCoy's interests, however, became early centred in natural history and, especially, palaeontology. At the age of eighteen he published a Catalogue of Organic Remains compiled from specimens exhibited in the Rotunda at Dublin (1841). He assisted Sir RJ Griffith by studying the fossils of the carboniferous and silurian rocks of Ireland, resulting in two publication: A Synopsis of the Character of Carboniferous Limestone Fossils of Ireland (1844) and Synopsis of the Silurian Fossils of Ireland (1846). In 1846 Sedgwick secured his services, and for at least four years he devoted himself to the determination and arrangement of the fossils in the Woodwardian Museum at Cambridge. Sedgwick wrote of him as "an excellent naturalist, an incomparable and most philosophical palaeontologist, and one of the steadiest and quickest workmen that ever undertook the arrangement of a museum" (Life and Letters of Sedgwick, ii. 194). Together they prepared the important and now classic work entitled A Synopsis of the Classification of the British Palaeozoic Rocks, with a Systematic Description of the British Palaeozoic Fossils in the Geological Museum of the University of Cambridge. Meanwhile, McCoy in 1850 had been appointed professor of geology in Queen's College, Belfast. McCoy's examination of fossil material preserving the teeth of Thylacoleo, an extinct carnivore, saw him enter the debate on the apparent absence of large predators in Australia's mammalian fauna; McCoy sided with Richard Owen's interpretation of his new species as representing a "marsupial lion". Career in Australia In 1854, McCoy accepted the newly founded professorship of natural science in the University of Melbourne, where he lectured for upwards of thirty years. When McCoy began his work at the university there were few students, and for many years he took classes in chemistry, mineralogy, botany, zoology, comparative anatomy, geology and palaeontology. In endeavouring to cover so much ground it was impossible for him to keep his reading up to date in all these sciences, and he remained most distinguished as