150 Years of the Geologists of the Cotteswold Naturalists Field Club.
The Rev.Peter Bellinger Brodie FGS (1815-1st November 1897) held a number of parishes in southern and central England and was the Curate of Down Hatherley near Cheltenham from 1840 to 1853. He was elected a member of the Cotteswold Club on January 18th 1849. Brodie was a collector and author of articles on, fossil insects from the Upper Lias, Lower Lias and Rhaetic.
Some of his fossil collection went to Gloucester City Museum, where it still forms part of the geology research collections. Most of it found its way through a sale in 1895 to the Natural History Museum. In 1848 he described a new species of dragonfly which he named Libellulla (Heterophlebia) dislocata found in the Upper Lias at Dumbleton Hill near Cheltenham. It was the first nearly perfect neuropterous insect ever found in this country, and surprisingly it had a wing span of around fourteen inches.
By 1865, he had become such an expert on fossil insects that he was able to publish a small book entitled "A History of the Fossil Insects in the Secondary Rocks of England". In 1886 he was Vice President of the Warwickshire Naturalists' and Archaeologists' Field Club. Brodie named various new species of fossils including the little ostracod Cypris liassica from the Avicula contorta zone of the Lower Lias.
His insect collections are mostly in the Natural History Museum, London, others are in the collections of the B.G.S. Keyworth; Warwick County Museum (where there is a display on Brodie) ; Dorset County Museum ; Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution ; Gloucester City Museum; and possibly (purchased by) University of Vienna.
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