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Robert Etheridge was a British palaeontologist who made important contributions to the Australian Museum.
Etheridge was born in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, England, the only son of the palaeontologist, Robert Etheridge and his wife Martha, née Smith. He was educated at the Royal School of Mines, London, under Thomas Huxley, and was trained as a palaeontologist by his father.
In 1866 Etheridge came to Australia, working under Alfred Richard Cecil Selwyn on the Victorian geological survey until it was terminated in 1869, and returned to England in 1871. Two years later he was appointed palaeontologist to the geological survey of Scotland, and in 1874 obtained a position in the geology department in the Natural History Museum at South Kensington. While there in co-operation with P. H. Carpenter he compiled a valuable Catalogue of the Blastoidea. In 1878–1880 with H. Alleyne Nicholson, Etheridge published a Monograph of the Silurian Fossils of the Girvan District in Ayrshire.
Etheridge returned to Australia in 1887 and was given a dual position as palaeontologist to the geological survey of New South Wales and the Australian Museum at Sydney. While in England he had much correspondence with his friend Dr Robert Logan Jack who had sent him many fossils from Queensland. From 1881 they worked together and in 1892 appeared The Geology and Palaeontology of Queensland and New Guinea, by Robert L. Jack and Robert Etheridge, Junior, an elaborate work with many plates and maps. Etheridge founded The Records of the Geological Survey, and published many papers on the fossils of the older strata.
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