Robert Fisher Tomes was an English

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

 farmer

Farmer

A farmer is a person engaged in agriculture, who raises living organisms for food or raw materials, generally including livestock husbandry and growing crops, such as produce and grain...

 and zoologist.

Tomes was born in Weston-on-Avon

Weston-on-Avon

Weston-on-Avon is a village which was recorded in the Domesday Book. Originally in Gloucestershire, it was transferred to Warwickshire in 1931...

 and farmed at Welford, Gloucestershire

Gloucestershire

Gloucestershire is a county in South West England. The county comprises part of the Cotswold Hills, part of the flat fertile valley of the River Severn, and the entire Forest of Dean....

. He was a specialist in bat

Bat

Bats are mammals of the order Chiroptera "hand" and pteron "wing") whose forelimbs form webbed wings, making them the only mammals naturally capable of true and sustained flight. By contrast, other mammals said to fly, such as flying squirrels, gliding possums, and colugos, glide rather than fly,...

s, describing a number of new species. His writings included the sections on insectivora

Insectivora

The order Insectivora is a now-abandoned biological grouping within the class of mammals...

 and chiroptera in the second edition of Thomas Bell

Thomas Bell (zoologist)

Thomas Bell FRS was an English zoologist, surgeon and writer, born in Poole, Dorset, UK.Bell, like his mother Susan, took a keen interest in natural history which his mother also encouraged in his younger cousin Philip Henry Gosse. Bell left Poole in 1813 for his training as a dental surgeon in...

's History of Quadrupeds.

His interest in ornithology

Ornithology

Ornithology is a branch of zoology that concerns the study of birds. Several aspects of ornithology differ from related disciplines, due partly to the high visibility and the aesthetic appeal of birds...

 waned, and he resigned from the British Ornithologists Union in 1866. His contributions to the two Victoria County Histories

Victoria County History

The Victoria History of the Counties of England, commonly known as the Victoria County History or the VCH, is an English history project which began in 1899 and was dedicated to Queen Victoria with the aim of creating an encyclopaedic history of each of the historic counties of...

 were his only significant ornithological works.

Tomes is buried at South Littleton, Worcestershire

Worcestershire

Worcestershire is a non-metropolitan county, established in antiquity, located in the West Midlands region of England. For Eurostat purposes it is a NUTS 3 region and is one of three counties that comprise the "Herefordshire, Worcestershire and Warwickshire" NUTS 2 region...

. His collection of mammals was sold to the Natural History Museum

Natural History Museum

The Natural History Museum is one of three large museums on Exhibition Road, South Kensington, London, England . Its main frontage is on Cromwell Road...

, and his bird collection was bequeathed to the museum in Worcester

Worcester

The City of Worcester, commonly known as Worcester, , is a city and county town of Worcestershire in the West Midlands of England. Worcester is situated some southwest of Birmingham and north of Gloucester, and has an approximate population of 94,000 people. The River Severn runs through the...

.

Selected bibliography

• Occurrence of the Fork-tailed Petrel in Warwickshire Zoologist, 8:2706-2707 (1850)
• On two species of bats inhabiting New Zealand. Proc. Zool. Soc. Lond., pp. 134-42 (1857)
• A monograph of the genus Nyctophilus. Proc. Zool. Soc. Lond., pp. 25-37 (1858)
• Descriptions of six hitherto undescribed species of bats. Proc. Zool. Soc. Lond. pp. 68-79 (1859)
• A monograph of the genus Epomophorus, with a description of a new species. Proc. Zool. Soc. Lond., pp. 42-58 (1860)
• Notes on a third collection of Mammalia, made by Mr. Fraser in the Republic of Ecuador. Proc. Zool. Soc. Lond. pp. 28 (1860)
• Report of a collection of mammals made by Osbert Salvin, Esq., FZS, at Dueñas, Guatemala. Proc. Zool. Soc. Lond. pp. 278 (1861)
• Notice of a new American form of marsupial. Proc. Zool. Soc. Lond., pp. 50–51 (1863)
• On a new genus and species of leaf-nosed bats in the museum at Fort Pitt. Proc. Zool. Soc. Lond., pp. 81-85 (1863)
• On some new or imperfectly known Madreporaria from the Inferior Oolite of Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire, and Dorsetshire. Geol. Mag. 23, 385-98, 443-52. (1886)
• On Heterastraea, a new genus of Madreporaria from the Lower Lias. Geol. Mag. 25, 207-18. (1888)
• Birds. In the Victoria County History of Worcestershire (1901)
• Aves. In the Victoria County History of Warwickshire (1904)