Andrews was born in
Hampstead, Middlesex . A graduate of the
University of London, Andrews was awarded an assistant's position at the British Museum, after a competitive exam, in 1892. His first concerns were with
fossil birds, and he described
Aepyornis titan, the extinct "Elephant Bird" of
Madagascar (1894). He noticed the connections among widely separated
flightless rails of
Mauritius, the
Chatham Islands and
New Zealand and deduced that their flightless character had been independently evolved on the spot.
Alfred Nicholson Leeds' gifts to the British Museum of Jurassic marine reptiles from the
Oxford Clay of
Peterborough elicited his interest in
plesiosaurs and other sea-reptiles which culminated in a catalogue of the Leeds collection at the British Museum (2 vols. 1910-13); his interest in this area did not flag afterwards: his last, posthumously-published paper concerned the skin impressions and other soft structures preserved in an
ichthyosaur paddle from
Leicestershire. In 1897 he was selected to spend several months at
Christmas Island in the
Indian Ocean, to inspect it before the activities of
phosphate mining compromised its natural history. The results were published by the British Museum in 1900. After 1900 his health began slowly to fail and he was sent to spend winter months in
Egypt; there he joined Beadnell of the Geological Survey of Egypt, inspecting fossils of freshwater fishes in the
Fayoum, where Andrews noticed mammalian fauna not previously detected and published
Moeritherium and an early elephant,
Palaeomastodon, followed by his
Descriptive Catalogue. In 1916 he was awarded the
Lyell Medal of the Geological Society. He was also an active member of the Zoological Society. ==Notes==