Dr. Martin Gaudin Lockley died peacefully at home on Saturday, November 25, surrounded by his family and loved ones. 

The son of Ronald Lockley and Jill Stocker Lockley, Dr. Lockley was born in St. Helier, Jersey in the Channel Islands on March 17, 1950. Dr. Lockley’s father was a noted naturalist, Oscar winner, and writer in the UK who published over sixty books on birds, rabbits, and nature. His father’s research and studies in natural science remained abiding influences throughout his life, as did several of his father’s friends, including Julian Huxley, Richard Adams, and Sir David Attenborough. In his formative years, Dr. Lockley lived with his family at Orielton in South Wales, which is now a nature preserve. He attended Orielton P.C, primary school in Hundleton, Wales, then Leighton Park School in England. He went on to attend Queen’s University, Belfast where he earned a BSc in Geology. At the University of Birmingham, where he earned his PhD, he researched Ordovician paleontology in Wales and was awarded a post-doctoral fellowship at Glasgow University, under the direction of his mentor, Sir Alwyn Williams.

In the 1980s, Dr. Lockley took a position at the University of Colorado at Denver, where his focus shifted from geology to dinosaur fossil footprints. During his tenure as professor at University of Colorado, he collaborated with a worldwide array of scientists and made significant track discoveries on most of the continents, particularly in eastern Asia and the American southwest, where he mapped the Purgatoire River Track site in southeast Colorado. Lockley created the Dinosaur Tracks Museum acting as Curator/Director from 1996 until 2012. During this time, he became a founding member of the Museum of Western Colorado with Dinosaur Ridge near Denver and he built up the fossil footprint collection to include more than 2,700 specimens representing Colorado and Utah. This research led Dr. Lockley to create an innovative new subdivision of paleontology, the study of vertebrate footprints, or vertebrate tracking, as he christened it, and he continued to extensively collect fossil footprints.

His scholarship was far reaching: For more than forty years, he published prolifically, producing over 1,000 publications and more than 600 peer-reviewed scientific articles on fossil footprints. He obtained park status for important footprint localities and promoted teaching fossil footprint science in public education. To this end, he helped create a UNESCO World Heritage site in South Korea and he was formative in the establishment of Dinosaur Ridge in Colorado.

His accomplishments merited numerous awards and appointments from various entities, including the Society of Petroleum Geologists, the Rocky Mountain Association of Geologists, and the University of Colorado Student Generated Award for Teaching. In 2018, the dinosaurus ichnogenus Lockleypus was named in his honor. In 2020, he was the first non-Korean to receive the Korean Presidential Medal for Distinguished Achievements. He held the position of associate curator at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science and was Director of Science at Moab Giants in Moab, Utah.

Dr. Lockley was a man of many talents and diverse interests. A gifted athlete, he excelled in rugby and twice won the All-England Schools championship in shot put and regularly followed track and field. In 2007 he earned a BA in Spanish with a minor in Religious Studies, which inspired him to write fluently and thoughtfully on the evolution of consciousness. He avidly collected rare books, read voraciously, and kept a record of his life in daily journals. His tastes were eclectic and ranged from Monty Python, George Carlin, Trevor Noah, and Van Morrison to Carl Jung and almost anything on Masterpiece Theatre.

Over the last year of his life, Dr. Lockley battled his illness courageously while completing several publications, including a biography about dinosaur egg expert, Karl Hirsh, his book Tracker Priests, and a collaborative work on gannets. He spent time with his family, particularly with his beloved grandchildren, and still traveled to distant conferences, conducting research in the field as recently as August. His desire to pass on his knowledge and expertise drove him to work with his colleagues until his final days.

Dr. Lockley is survived by his children, Peter Lockley (Emily), and Katie Lockley Weller (Spencer) and his four grandchildren, Graham, Aurelia, Isla and Daniel, his children by marriage, Luis Ferreyra (Olivia), Linda Ferreria Campos (Cesar) and his nephew, Daniel Lockley (Liz) and grand-niece and nephew, Juniper and Asher Martin Lockley. He is also survived by his sister, Ann Mark, and his long-term partner, Gretchen Kloten Minney, and by Dr. Mary Rossick Kern and Jerome Kern, and by Linda Dale Jennings (Russel). He was preceded in death by his younger brother, Steven Lockley (2010).