Michael Waldman obituary

My friend Michael Waldman, who has died aged 83, was a palaeontologist and an inspiring teacher of geology. He discovered one of the most productive and important fossil sites in Scotland, and named several new species of extinct animals.

Mike discovered the fossil site in 1971, during a Duke of Edinburgh school trip that he was co-leading to Skye. There, near the village of Elgol, he found the first mammal fossil from the time of dinosaurs in Scotland, named Borealestes serendipitus, “the northern rogue found by serendipity”. On subsequent trips, he and colleagues discovered fossil skeletons of fish, salamanders, lizards, turtles and mammals from the Middle Jurassic, some of the most complete examples of their kind in the world.