View Professor Ken Campbell's photo gallery
You can order the DVD from the Academy for $15 (including GST and postage)
Professor Ken Campbell was interviewed in 2000 for the Australian Academy of Science's '100 Years of Australian Science' project funded by the National Council for the Centenary of Federation. This project is part of the Interviews with Australian scientists program. By viewing the interviews in this series, or reading the transcripts and extracts, your students can begin to appreciate Australia's contribution to the growth of scientific knowledge.
The following summary of Campbell's career sets the context for the extract chosen for these teachers notes. The extract highlights his studies of trilobites and his interest in how fossil animals might have functioned when alive. Use the focus questions that accompany the extract to promote discussion among your students.
Ken Campbell was born in Ipswich, Queensland in 1927. He was educated at Brisbane Grammar School then went on to study science at the University of Queensland, gaining a BSc in 1948. He worked for a year for the Queensland Geological Survey, interpreting the geology of an area from aerial photographs. During this time he was also working on his MSc, which he was awarded in 1951. His main interests at this time were stratigraphy and invertebrate fossils of the Permian and Carboniferous periods.
Campbell taught mathematics at Albury Grammar School for a year in 1949 then moved to Armidale where he was a lecturer and then senior lecturer in geology at the University of New England (1952-62). During this time he gained his PhD (1958) from the University of Queensland. When Campbell was awarded the Nuffield Dominion Travelling Fellowship in 1958, he went to Cambridge University where he became interested in the zoology of the animals that fascinated him as fossils.
Campbell recognised the importance of fossils to stratigraphy and biogeography before the advent of the plate tectonic revolution, and he began publishing material showing that there had been movement of the ancient continent, Gondwana.
In 1962 Campbell moved to the Australian National University to work with another palaeontologist, David Brown. When he was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship in 1965, he went to Harvard to learn more about trilobites. This interest in trilobites led to a major work – the International Treatise on Palaeontology. He also became interested in rates of evolution of organisms. Campbell remained at the Australian National University until 1992, when he retired.
Ken Campbell became a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science in 1983 and was a member of Council 1990-93. He was awarded the Clarke Medal of the Royal Society of New South Wales in 1980 and was the Mawson Lecturer of the Academy of Science in 1986.
Interviewer: After you came to Canberra you got a Fulbright Fellowship to Harvard. Didn’t that lead you to become one of the great experts in trilobites?
I wouldn’t say I am an expert, but I did go to learn trilobites from Whittington. He had a National Science Foundation grant on which he employed me. Coming out of the Carboniferous, I’m now plonked in the middle of the Silurian and Devonian and there are ample trilobites here, and I needed to learn something about them to have my own PhD students here. Whittington was expecting a bloke from the southern hemisphere, coming from an area which is frozen, who would probably have a mind frozen in some way or other. But I knew a fair bit, and I think he was very much concerned that I was as far ahead as I was, so much further ahead than any of his other students. We became very good friends, and after I’d worked on Silurian trilobites from Oklahoma, he asked me to work with him on a project in Maine, for a joint paper. That’s what got me going on trilobites.
And then led to your major work with the International Treatise on Palaeontology? It is a landmark piece of work.
That’s right – and I’m still working on it. I’ll never give it up. In fact, one of my students from Canberra and I are together doing a group for that Treatise. Also I had a remarkable student, Brian Chatterton, who came from Trinity College, Dublin, and worked with me on the material up on the Burrinjuck. He was working on brachiopods then, because that was my original field, and he started to find a whole series of things. He contributed a major section to the first volume on trilobites for the Treatise.
In addition, I had another Queenslander, Peter Jell, who worked on Cambrian tribolites, and he contributed several sections to the Treatise, and another man, David Holloway, who is also making major contributions. I am grateful that in a large international exercise three of my students have taken a leading role.
In view of the evolution of your work from stratigraphy into the animals themselves, let’s return now to your Dominion Travelling Fellowship to Cambridge, where I think you developed a new way of looking at fossils. You said to me recently that you have always tried to make sure your students go overseas if at all possible.
That’s certainly true. I had never been overseas before I went to Cambridge. We went on the Strathnaver – five weeks, it took – and we were the first people through the Suez Canal after the blow-up there. We were buzzed by Egyptian Air Force planes and wondered whether they were going to land on the top of the ship, and we weren’t allowed ashore or anything of that sort. It was all interesting as part of the trip.
Being interested in stratigraphy, I took with me Permian specimens from Queensland and New South Wales – and Tasmania, and Western Australia – trying to fit together a stratigraphic pattern which would cover the whole area. In Cambridge, Martin Rudwick said to me, ‘These are just relics of past life. What do you know about the way these things lived? What do you know about the way the feeding organisms worked? What about the perforations in the skeleton? What on earth are they for? You’ve described them all, but what on earth does it all mean?’ This is functional morphology, and he suddenly raised for me the possibility that as well as getting the stratigraphy out of these animals, you could see the way in which they evolved. It was a real eye-opener to me: I had to start then and learn some zoology to put with the geology, to see how all these things fitted together.
It was Martin Rudwick who really started me off. He was doing some experimental work on animals, making up models to show how they might have fed and respired. That kind of work stirred me up to try to do something about function, and function as part of the history of life. Previously, most of the descriptions had been generalised, useful descriptions to enable people to identify the animals and put them in a stratigraphic column, but unfortunately that’s only part of the story.
Select activities that are most appropriate for your lesson plan or add your own. You can also encourage students to identify key issues in the preceding extract and devise their own questions or topics for discussion.
© 2025 Australian Academy of Science
