Colin Patterson FRS (1933-1998), was a paleontologist

Paleontology

Paleontology "old, ancient", ὄν, ὀντ- "being, creature", and λόγος "speech, thought") is the study of prehistoric life. It includes the study of fossils to determine organisms' evolution and interactions with each other and their environments...

 at the British Museum

British Museum

The British Museum is a museum of human history and culture in London. Its collections, which number more than seven million objects, are amongst the largest and most comprehensive in the world and originate from all continents, illustrating and documenting the story of human culture from its...

 who specialised in fossil fish and systematics, advocating the transformed cladistics

Cladistics

Cladistics is a method of classifying species of organisms into groups called clades, which consist of an ancestor organism and all its descendants . For example, birds, dinosaurs, crocodiles, and all descendants of their most recent common ancestor form a clade...

 school.

He authored a general textbook on evolution, Evolution, and edited Molecules and morphology in evolution: conflict or compromise? a book on the use of molecular and morphological evidence for inferring phylogenies.

Patterson has been quote mined several times by creationists, most notably from a tape recording of a talk he gave in 1981 at the American Museum of Natural History

American Museum of Natural History

The American Museum of Natural History , located on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City, United States, is one of the largest and most celebrated museums in the world...

for a systematics discussion group. Patterson personally rejected the creationist interpretations of his sayings.