While on a school field trip to Pembrokeshire in Wales in the early 1960s, the 14-year-old Richard Fortey stumbled across his first trilobite – the 500-million-year-old fossil of a prehistoric marine animal. This chance event ultimately led him to a long and distinguished career as a palaeontologist at the Natural History Museum. He also forged a parallel career as an inspirational communicator via his books and TV series. His colleague Dr Sandra Knapp notes that “Richard was the definition of polymath”, while Bill Bryson thought him “without peer amongst science writers”.
Spurred by that childhood discovery, Fortey, who has died aged 79 after a short illness, became one of the world’s leading experts on trilobites and graptolites, another group of invertebrates found in the same rocks. In more than 250 scientific papers, he significantly furthered scientific knowledge of their complex evolution and lifecycles, while reaching a broader, non-specialist audience with his bestselling popular science books. The first of these was the 1982 volume Fossils: The Key to the Past, whose fifth edition was published more than 30 years later in 2015. Others included The Hidden Landscape (1994), Life: An Unauthorised Biography (1997), Trilobite! Eyewitness to Evolution (2000) and The Earth: An Intimate History (2004).
