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A K Totton was born in Surrey on 6 January 1892, and educated at Berkhamsted School. He studied at the Royal College of Science, London, attending lectures by Adam Sedgwick and E W MacBride, among others, and joined the staff of the British Museum (Natural History) in 1914. Totton served with distinction in the 1914-1918 war, being commissioned in 1915 and awarded the Military Cross the following year. He was severely wounded in 1916 and was invalided out of the army in 1918.
On his return to the Museum, Totton was given charge of the Coelenterate Section. Although he published on a number of coelenterate groups, it was the siphonophores which became his speciality. His first major work on the group was his Barrier Reef Expedition report (1932), to be followed by his Discovery Report on the siphonophores of the Indian Ocean (1954), and, the culmination of his work, the Synopsis of the Siphonophora (1965). Totton visited the West Indies on HMS Rodney in 1932, travelled to the Canary Islands with G O Mackie in 1955, and worked at the Villefranche Marine Station for a number of summers from 1949. Totton retired from the Museum in 1953, and was employed as an Associate until 1963. He continued his coelenterate researches until just before his death on 12 January 1973.