Phillips was born at
Marden in
Wiltshire. His father belonged to an old
Welsh family, but settled in England as an officer of excise and married the sister of
William Smith, a renowned English geologist. When both parents died when he was a child, Phillips's custody was assumed by Smith, and Phillips was brought into Smith's London home during early 1815. During the next few years, he attended various schools and helped his uncle with his geological research and writing; he also developed an interest in lithography (printing from prepared slabs of stone) and was among the earliest English practitioners of the process, experimenting with it between about 1816 and 1819. After ending school, Phillips accompanied Smith on his wanderings in connection with his preparation of geological maps. During the spring of 1824, Smith went to
York to deliver a course of lectures on geology, and his nephew Phillips accompanied him. Phillips accepted engagements in the principal
Yorkshire towns to arrange their museums and give courses of lectures on the collections contained therein. York became his residence, and he obtained during 1826 the situation of keeper of the
Yorkshire Museum and secretary of the
Yorkshire Philosophical Society at the same time as Henry Robinson was Librarian of the YPS. From that centre, Phillips extended his operations to towns beyond the county, and by 1831 he included
University College London within the sphere of his activity. During that year the
British Association for the Advancement of Science was initiated at York, and Phillips was one of the people who organized it. He became the first assistant secretary in 1832, a job which he had until 1859. In 1834, he accepted the professorship of geology at
King's College London, but retained his job at York. In 1834, Phillips was elected a fellow of the
Royal Society. During later years he received honorary degrees of
LL.D. from
Dublin and
Cambridge, and
D.C.L. from
Oxford; while in 1845 he was awarded the
Wollaston Medal by the
Geological Society of London. In 1840, he resigned his charge of the Yorkshire Museum and was appointed to the staff of the geological survey of
Great Britain managed by
Henry De la Beche. Phillips spent some time studying the
Palaeozoic fossils of
Devon,
Cornwall and West
Somerset, of which he published a descriptive memoir (in 1841). During that same year, he published the first global
geologic time scale, which ordered rock strata according to the types of fossils found within. This helped standardize the usage of the terms
Paleozoic period, which he extended to a longer period than it had had by previous usage, and
Mesozoic period, the latter being his own invention. He also made a detailed survey of the region of the
Malvern Hills, of which he prepared the elaborate account that appears in vol. ii. of the Memoirs of the Survey (1848). In 1844, he became professor of geology for
Trinity College Dublin. Nine years later, on the death of
Hugh Edwin Strickland, who had acted as substitute for
Dean Buckland in the readership of geology in the University of Oxford, Phillips succeeded to the post of deputy. At the dean's death in 1856, Phillips became himself reader, a post which he had to the time of his death. During his residence in
Oxford, he had a major part in the foundation and arrangement of the
University Museum established in 1859 (see his
Notices of Rocks and Fossils in the University Museum, 1863; and
The Oxford Museum, by H. W. Acland and
J. Ruskin, 1859; reprinted with additions 1893). Phillips was also keeper of the
Ashmolean Museum from 1854 until 1870. During 1859–1860 he was president of the Geological Society of London, and during 1865 president of the British Association. Phillips also made astronomical observations of the
planet Mars during its 1862
opposition. On 23 April 1874, he dined at
All Souls College, but on leaving he slipped and fell down a flight of stone stairs. He died the next day, and was buried in
York Cemetery beside his sister
Anne. His coffin was accompanied to
Oxford railway station by 200 university academics. ==Selected writings==