The papers of Professor Sir Gavin Rylands De Beer comprise notebooks, typescript lecture texts and photographs, [1917-1947]; notably including four manuscript notebooks containing summaries of lectures attended by De Beer when he was an undergraduate and fellow at Oxford, consisting of notes on rudimentary embryology and zoology with sketches and bibliographies, [1917-1938]; proofs and fair copies of the text of De Beer's anniversary lecture as President of the Linnean Society on animal posture and morphology with photographs and drawings, [1947]; transparencies used in a talk on evolution, [1947]; microscopy photographs of the embryonic development of monotremes and marsupials and, at the cellular level, of the salamander, [1945-1972]; photographs and plaster casts of the brain case and other parts of a fossilised specimen of the bird-like Archaeopteryx, [1950-1960]; photographs of cross sections through a mature tree showing growth rings, [1950-1960].

Copy notes and diagrams, 1988, on 'General theory of colour', and planetary motion, with diagrams and covering letters; paper, Jul 1988, on 'The foundations of knowledge', listing an ideal syllabus.