Shona M. Bell
New Zealand palaeobotanist (1924–2011) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Shona Margaret Bell (married name Grant-Taylor, 19 April 1924 – 7 December 2011) was a New Zealand palaeontologist.[1][2]
Bell was born on 19 April 1924 in the Auckland suburb of Birkenhead.[3] Her parents were Dorothy (née Ambrose) and Lionel Bell, who had married in 1922. Her mother was a school teacher from Christchurch and her father worked for the Union Bank in Auckland.[4][5] By the early 1930s, the Bell family was living in Waipukurau in the Hawke's Bay, where her father was the manager of the Union Bank.[6] In March 1938, the Bell family moved to Wellington, where her father had been appointed to a head office position at the Union Bank.[7]
At the end of 1939, Bell matriculated from a school in Wellington, achieving a medical preliminary entrance.[8] She studied towards a Bachelor of Science at Auckland University College, passing her exams in geology at the University of New Zealand towards the end of 1945.[9] She studied the fossils of the Corbies Creek area of North Otago[10] and the Benmore Dam area.[11] The 1954 Directory of New Zealand Science records her as an assistant palaeontologist at the Geological Survey of New Zealand.[12] She was employed by GSNZ from 1948 to 1950, but resigned on her marriage to Tom Grant-Taylor, as was expected at the time.[13][14]
Bell's husband died in 1982.[15] She died at the Heretaunga Care Centre in the Upper Hutt suburb of Silverstream on 7 December 2011.[2]
In 2011 a newly discovered genus of fossil in the Codiaceae family was named Shonabellia in her honour by Gregory Retallack. The type species Shonabellia verrucosa was found near Benmore Dam, an area where Bell was the first to describe fossil plants.[11]
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