An English clergyman, Conybeare is best known as co-author, with William Phillips, of Outline of the Geology of England and Wales (1822), one of the most influential textbooks on stratigraphy of the period. He also described and reconstructed saurian fossils from the Lyme Regis area of England. As a friend and collaborator of William Buckland, Conybeare was an influential member of the Oxford School of Geology.