Richard Fortey

Richard Alan Fortey (15 February 1946 – 7 March 2025) was a British palaeontologist, natural historian, writer and television presenter, who served as president of the Geological Society of London for its bicentennial year of 2007. As a paleontologist, he specialised on trilobites and other extinct arthropods, as well as the life and paleogeography of the Paleozoic era, particularly the Ordovician.

Background

Fortey was born in Ealing, west London in 1946, to Frank Fortey, who ran two fishing tackle shops, and Margaret Wilshin. He spent much of his early years "half-wild in the countryside" near Newbury in Berkshire, where his family owned a caravan and later a cottage by a chalk stream. During a school trip to Pembrokeshire when he was 14, Fortey discovered his first trilobite. He later recalled this moment with poetic intensity:

The rock simply parted around the animal like some sort of revelation. Surely what I held was the textbook come alive. The long, thin eyes of the trilobite regarded me and I returned the gaze. More compelling than any pair of blue eyes, there was a shiver of recognition across 500 million years.

He won a place at Ealing Grammar School for Boys. While preparing to sit his scholarship exams for King's College, Cambridge, his father died in a car crash. He read Natural Sciences specialising in geology and got a first class degree in 1968. His natural sciences tutor as an undergraduate was Harry B Whittington, one of the world’s foremost experts on trilobites.

As a 21-year-old undergraduate, Fortey went on an expedition to Spitsbergen in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard collecting triobites. The trilobites he discovered attracted international attention, including from the palaeontologist, David Bruton, who organised a second expedition to Spitsbergen in 1971 to collect further samples. All the 100 species of trilobites he discovered were new to science and provided the basis for his PhD.

He received a PhD and DSc from the University of Cambridge. He did his PhD under Harry B Whttington.

Natural History Museum, London

Ealing Grammar School, usually had a geology teacher who took Fortey in his school class to the Natural History Museum in London "and pointed to a door where, he said, lived 'experts who work on fossils'. 'I thought: "I’d like to be that,"' Fortey recalled".

In 1970, he became a research fellow at the Natural History Museum, and spent his entire career there as a palaeontologist. He retired in 2006.

His speciality was trilobites and graptolites, especially those from the Ordovician and their systematics, evolution and modes of life. He was 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. In addition, he was the author of popular science books on a range of subjects including geology, palaeontology, evolution and natural history, e.g. Trilobite! or ''Dry Store Room no.1.''

Television

From 2012, he was 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 the University of Oxford 1999–2009.

Fortey appeared in several of David Attenborough's programmes, including the second episode of David Attenborough's '' Lost Worlds, Vanished Lives'' in 1989, as well as '' First Life'' in 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''.

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, while 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'', followed by ''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.

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.

Honours

Fortey was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2023 New Year Honours for services to palaeontology and geology.

Death

Fortey died after a short illness on 7 March 2025, at the age of 79.

Books

* ''A Curious Boy'', William Collins (2021, )
* ''Fossils: The Key to the Past'', Natural History Museum (1982, fifth edition 2015)
*''The Hidden Landscape'', Jonathan Cape (1993, ), Bodley Head (revised edition 2010)
* ''Life: An Unauthorised Biography. A Natural History of the First Four Billion Years of Life on Earth'', HarperCollins (1997, ), Folio Society edition (2008)
* ''Trilobite!: Eyewitness to Evolution'', HarperCollins (2000, )
* ''The Earth: An Intimate History'', HarperCollins (2004, ), Folio Society edition (2011)
* ''Dry Store Room No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum'', HarperPress (2008, )
* ''Survivors: The Animals and Plants That Time Has Left Behind'', HarperCollins (2011), published as ''Horseshoe Crabs and Velvet Worms'' (2012) in the US
* ''The Wood for the Trees: The Long View of Nature from a Small Wood'', William Collins (2016, )

He also penned humorous titles under two pseudonyms:

* ''The Roderick Masters Book of Money-Making Schemes, or How to Become Enormously Wealthy with Virtually No Effort'', published anonymously, Routledge & Kegan Paul (1981, )
* ''Bindweed's Bestseller'', ed. Heather & David Godwin, Jackie & Richard Fortey, Pan Books (1982, )

Awards and honours

For his academic research he 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 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 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 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; 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''.

References

External links

*

Review
by Tim Radford of the book '' Earth: An Intimate History'', by Richard Fortey, ''The Guardian''

{{DEFAULTSORT:Fortey, Richard
1946 births
2025 deaths
British palaeontologists
Fellows of the Royal Society
Fellows of the Geological Society of London
Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature
Employees of the Natural History Museum, London
People educated at Ealing County Grammar School for Boys
Lyell Medal winners
Alumni of King's College, Cambridge
Officers of the Order of the British Empire
Presidents of the Geological Society of London
People from Ealing