Henry Riley (1797-1848) was a local surgeon and medical school teacher who had graduated MD in Paris in the mid 1820s; he 'was very like a Frenchman in appearance and manners' (Prichard, 1894, p. 6). Riley lived in Berkeley Square, Clifton, and he had gained brief notoriety in 1828, when he was fined £6 for attempting to rob a grave in Brislington, Bristol (Smith, 1917).

Riley gave a successful series of lectures on 'Zoological and Philosophical Anatomy' in Bristol in 1831-1833, emphasising the works of Lamarck, Cuvier, and Geoffroy, and he was a member of the important group of gentleman naturalists who founded and sustained the Bristol Institution (Taylor and Torrens, 1987; Taylor, 1994). He served on the Bristol Institution Committee from 1833 to 1836, and at the same time he was secretary of the Bristol, Clifton and West of England Zoological Society, which procured £7000 for the purchase of land and the establishment of Bristol Zoo in 1835-1836 (Green-Armytage, 1964; Hunter, 2004, p. 454).

Riley's credentials in palaeontology had been established by his lectures, and by his description of the Lias cartilaginous fish Squaloraia (Riley, 1833, 1837), based on a specimen obtained from Mary Anning (Taylor and Torrens, 1987).

• Green-Armytage, A.H.N., 1964. Bristol Zoo 1835-1965. A Short History of the Bristol Clifton and West of England Zoological Society. Arrowsmith, Bristol, 115 pp.
• Hunter, P., 2004. Veterinary Medicine: a Guide to Historical Sources. Ashgate, Aldershot, 611 pp.
• Prichard, A., 1894. Bristol Medical School. Arrowsmith, Bristol, 31 pp.
• Riley, H., 1833. On a fossil in the Bristol Museum, and discovered in the Lias at Lyme Regis. Proceedings of the Geological Society of London 1, 483-484.
• Riley, H., 1837. On the Squaloraia. Transactions of the Geological Society of London, Series 2, 5, 83-88.
• Smith, C.M., 1917. A History of the Bristol Royal Infirmary. Arrowsmith, Bristol, 507 pp.
• Taylor, M.A., 1994. The plesiosaur's birthplace: the Bristol Institution and its contribution to vertebrate palaeontology. Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society 112, 179-196.
• Taylor, M.A., Torrens, H.S., 1987. Saleswoman to a new science: Mary Anning and the fossil fish Squaloraja from the Lias of Lyme Regis. Proceedings of the Dorset Natural History and Archaeological Society 108, 135-148.

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