Brian John Marples

Marples was born in Hessle, Yorkshire, in north-eastern England.^[1] His parents were Annie and George Marples. His father was a teacher of art, and he had an older brother, Morris Marples.^[2]

He was educated at Kingsmead in Cheshire, and St Bees in Cumberland before attending Exeter College, Oxford. He graduated BA from Oxford in 1929, subsequently obtaining a MSc degree from the University of Manchester in 1931, and his Oxford degree was promoted to MA in 1933. He married Mary (Molly) Joyce Ransford in 1931.^[1]

From 1930 to 1936 Marples worked as Assistant Lecturer in Zoology at Manchester. In 1937 he went to New Zealand to become Professor of Zoology at the University of Otago, a position he served in for 30 years before retiring in 1967 to Woodstock, near Oxford in southern England. He published numerous papers on a wide variety of zoological topics, especially in the fields of ornithology, arachnology and fossil penguins.^[1] He was also a cofounder of the Ornithological Society of New Zealand.^[3]

• 1953 – Fellow, Royal Society of New Zealand
• 1980 – Honorary Member, Ornithological Society of New Zealand