Robinson was born in
Elliot, South Africa to Theodore Clement Robinson and Florence Harriett Robinson (née Selby), both descendants of the British
1820 Settlers. He attended the
University of Cape Town where he obtained a BSc in
zoology and
bacteriology in 1943 and an MSc (zoology) in 1944, with a thesis on the giant girdled lizard (
Cordylus giganteus). He contributed to two
dissection manuals, one on the clawed frog (
Xenopus) and the other on the spiney dogfish shark (
Squalus). He started his doctorate in marine biology in
Cape Town and even went so far as to publish descriptions of new
diatoms and
copepods but he interrupted it by moving to the
Transvaal Museum in
Pretoria at the end of 1945 to take up the position of "assistant professional officer". He became the assistant to
Anthonie Johannes Theodorus Janse, a
Lepidoptera specialist (a
moth specialist). The pre-eminent
paleontologist Robert Broom was working at the Transvaal Museum at that time and the museum felt that he needed a
collection manager as Broom had gotten into the habit of merely memorising contextual information about fossil specimens instead of physically recording the
provenance information systematically. It was the Canadian geologist
H. B. S. Cooke who suggested that Robinson should assist Broom. This did not please Janse. In April 1946 Robinson became the assistant to
Robert Broom and he worked with him for four years until Broom's death in 1951. They focused on excavations at the caves of
Sterkfontein (where they discovered "
Mrs. Ples" a specimen of
Australopithecus africanus, in 1947),
Swartkrans (which yielded several fossils of
Paranthropus robustus and
Telanthropis capensis) and
Kromdraai. They discovered over 300 specimens of early humans, the
Australopithecinae. Between 1946 and 1952 they jointly published twenty-three books and articles. After Broom's death, Robinson worked with
C.K. Brain. In 1955 Robinson completed his PhD in zoology at the University of Cape Town but with a dissertation "The Dentition of the Australopithecinae", published 1956 and arguably his most important work. He took over as head of the Department of
Vertebrate Paleontology and
Physical Anthropology and eventually became assistant director of the Transvaal Museum. In 1963 Robinson began a professorship in zoology and
anthropology at the
University of Wisconsin–Madison where he remained until his retirement in 1983. He taught courses in
evolutionary theory and
human origins,
zoology and
anthropology. He was director of the University of Wisconsin Zoological Museum from 1979 to 1981. Robinson continued to make trips back to South Africa to carry out research. == Significance of discoveries ==