Isabel Clifton Cookson

Who was Isabel Clifton Cookson?

Isabel Clifton Cookson was an Australian botanist who specialised in palaeobotany and palynology.

Cookson was born at Hawthorn, Victoria, and attended the Methodist Ladies' College at Kew where she gained honours in anatomy, physiology and botany in the senior public examination. She went on to study for her BSc at the University of Melbourne and graduated in 1916 with majors in botany and zoology. When she completed her studies she became a demonstrator at the university, and between 1916 and 1917 received a government research scholarship and the MacBain research scholarship in biology, amongst other awards to study the flora of the Northern Territory. She contributed illustrations for the 1917 book The Flora of the Northern Territory by Alfred J. Ewart and O. B. Davies.

She continued working at the University of Melbourne, until she visited the Imperial College of Science and Technology between 1925 and 1926, and, on a return visit in the University of Manchester between 1926 and 1927. At Manchester she began a long and productive academic relationship with W. H. Lang, Lang named the genus Cooksonia in her honour. From 1929 her research focussed on palaeobotany, she wrote several papers on fossil plants including early vascular plants from the Silurian and Early Devonian which helped to shape theories of early land-plant evolution. She also studied more recent coal forming deposits. Her work on the early terrestrial fossil plants of Victoria and field work showing associated graptolites and plants led to her research thesis and to a D.Sc. from the University of Melbourne in 1932.