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William Davies, FGS was a British palaeontologist.
Davies was born on 13 July 1814 at Holywell, Flintshire. His father was Thomas Davies and his mother was Elizabeth Turner. He studied botany and in 1843 began work at the Geology Department of the British Museum, first also in the field of mineralogy, later specialising in vertebrate palaeontology. On 1 April 1846 he joint the Survey as a Fossil Collector. Davies assisted Sir Antonio Brady in his work on collecting Pleistocene mammal fossils, and Brady acknowledged his debt to Davies in Catalogue of Pleistocene Mammalia from Ilford, Essex. Excavating a large mammoth skull, Davies used the innovation of surrounding the fossil, in the field, with plaster of Paris, reinforced by iron bars. In 1874 he salvaged the Dacentrurus holotype. Davies was awarded the inaugural Murchison Medal from the Geological Society of London in 1873, and was made a fellow in 1877. In 1875 he was made an Assistant, responsible for the entire fossil collection of the museum, and in 1880 was promoted Assistant First Class. In 1880, Davies supervised the transfer of the museum's collections to new buildings in the Natural History Museum.
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