Michael Rogers Oldfield Thomas (21 February 1858 – 16 June 1929) was a British zoologist.
Career
Thomas worked at the Natural History Museum on mammals, describing about 2,000 new species and subspecies for the first time. He was appointed to the museum secretary's office in 1876, transferring to the zoological department in 1878.
In 1891, Thomas married Mary Kane, daughter of Sir Andrew Clark, heiress to a small fortune, which gave him the finances to hire mammal collectors and present their specimens to the museum. He also did field work himself in Western Europe and South America. His wife shared his interest in natural history, and accompanied him on collecting trips. allowing Thomas to concentrate on these new specimens. On 6 June 1901 he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society.
Thomas viewed his taxonomy efforts from the scope of British imperialism. "You and I in our scientific lives have seen the general knowledge of Mammals of the world wonderfully advanced – there are few or no blank areas anymore", he said in a letter to Gerrit Smith Miller Jr. he actually died at home in 1929, aged 71, about a year after the death of his wife, "a severe blow from which he never recovered."