Richard Fortey

Early life and education

Fortey was educated at Ealing Grammar School for Boys and King's College, Cambridge, where he read Natural Sciences specialising in geology. He received a PhD and DSc from the University of Cambridge.

Career

Fortey has had a long career as a palaeontologist at the Natural History Museum in London;his research interests include above all, trilobites: at the age of 14, he discovered his first trilobite, sparking a passionate interest that later became a career. He has named numerous trilobite species and still continues his research despite having retired from the Museum.

He studies trilobites and graptolites, especially those from the Ordovician and their systematics, evolution and modes of life; he is also involved in research on Ordovician palaeogeography and correlation; arthropod evolution, especially the origin of major groups and the relationships between divergence times, as revealed by molecular evidence and the fossil record. His scientific output includes over 250 papers on trilobites, Ordovician stratigraphy and palaeogeography.

He is the author of popular science books on a range of subjects including geology, palaeontology, evolution and natural history. Since 2012, he has also been a television presenter appearing on BBC Four presenting natural history programmes; was Collier Professor for the Public Understanding of Science and Technology at the Institute of Advanced Studies in the University of Bristol 2002 and Visiting Professor of Palaeobiology at Oxford University 1999-2009.

Television

Fortey appeared in "Putting Flesh on Bone", the second episode of David Attenborough's Lost Worlds, Vanished Lives in 1989. He also made an appearance in another Attenborough series, First Life (2010), travelling with the presenter to the Atlas mountains to find and film trilobite fossils. He contributed to the speculative Discovery Channel documentary series The Future Is Wild.

He appeared on BBC Two's "University Challenge - The Professionals" in 2004, as a member of the Palaeontological Association team, who beat the Eden Project.

In 2012, Fortey presented the BBC Four series Survivors: Nature's Indestructible Creatures, which took a global look at modern-day species whose ancestors survived mass extinction events in the Earth's history.

In 2013 he presented the BBC Four programme The Secret Life of Rock Pools, which aired on 16 April 2013.

In 2014, Fortey presented the BBC Four three part series Fossil Wonderlands: Nature's Hidden Treasures, when he travelled to fossil sites to learn more about the distant past. It aired from 11 March 2014.

In 2014, he presented the BBC Four programme The Magic of Mushrooms, in which he showed that fungi had close but still poorly understood inter-relationships with plants and animals including man.

In 2016, he presented the BBC Four programme Nature’s Wonderlands: Islands of Evolution, a three part series on evolution on islands.

In 2017, Fortey presented the Fossil Wonderlands: Nature's Hidden Treasures series, based on the fossilised history of many global locations, and the relevance of this for modern day.

Books

He has also penned humorous titles under two pseudonyms.

Awards and honours

For his academic research he has won the Lyell Medal of the Geological Society of London, the Linnean Medal for Zoology of the Linnean Society of London, the Frink Medal of the Zoological Society of London, the R. C. Moore Medal of the SEPM, the T. N. George Medal of the Geological Society of Glasgow; in 1997 he was elected as a fellow of the Royal Society.

His popular science writing has earned him the Natural World Book of the Year award (1994) for The Hidden Landscape; the Lewis Thomas Prize for science writing (2003) and is the 2006 holder of the Royal Society's Michael Faraday Prize for the public communication of science. In 1998, Life: An Unauthorised Biography was shortlisted for the Rhône-Poulenc Prize, in 2001, Trilobite!: Eyewitness to Evolution was shortlisted the Samuel Johnson Prize, the UK’s most prestigious non-fiction award and in 2005 Earth: An Intimate History was shortlisted for the Royal Society’s Aventis prize for science books. Life: an Unauthorised Biography was listed as one of ten Books of the Year by the New York Times. He has also turned his pen to writing dinosaur poems for children and even a spoof book on the Rubik's Cube.

Fortey was elected President of the Geological Society of London for its bicentennial year of 2007 and was recently awarded honorary degrees by the University of St Andrews; the Open University; the Birmingham University and Leicester University. He has also been President of the Palaeontological Association and Palaeontographical Society; in 2009 was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Fortey has also served on the Councils of the Systematics Association; the Royal Society; the Palaeontographical Society (ex president); the British Mycological Society (Vice President), and on the Stratigraphy Committee of the Geological Society of London; has served on the Editorial Boards of the Terra Nova; the Palaeontographica Italiana; the Historical Biology; the Biological Proceedings of the Royal Society of London and the Biology Letters.