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).
Relatively late in life, in his mid-60s, Fortey embarked on a new career as a television presenter on BBC Four series. Originally broadcast from 2012 to 2016, these were Survivors: Nature’s Indestructible Creatures, The Secret Life of Rockpools, Fossil Wonderlands, The Magic of Mushrooms and Nature’s Wonderlands.
Earlier in his career he had appeared in several programmes with Sir David Attenborough, and in 2004, he was a member of the Palaeontological Association team on University Challenge – The Professionals, which beat a team from the Eden Project.
Having retired from his full-time post at the Natural History Museum in 2006, after working there more or less continuously since 1970, he wrote two more personal titles, each packed with delightful stories. The Wood for the Trees: The Long View of Nature from a Small Wood (2016), told the story of Grim’s Dyke Wood, four acres of beech and bluebell woodland in the Chiltern Hills, which he bought with the proceeds of the TV series. A Curious Boy (2021), subtitled “The Making of a Scientist”, is a compelling memoir of his childhood.
Fortey was born in Ealing, west London, shortly after the end of the second world war. His parents, Margaret (nee Wilshin) and Frank Fortey, ran two fishing tackle shops, although his mother, who he noted “was very aware of social distinctions”, preferred him to use the word “aquarist” when talking to schoolfriends.
In 1957 Richard passed the 11-plus exam and won a place at Ealing grammar school for boys. However, he spent much of his early years “half wild in the countryside”, near Newbury in Berkshire, where the family owned a caravan, and later a cottage, by a chalk stream. Some of his earliest memories, recounted seven decades later in A Curious Boy, were of his father landing brown trout. These experiences, and the plethora of birds and other wildlife he encountered, “turned me into a keen naturalist”.
But amid this bucolic charm, the memoir has a darker side. He recalls how his father never filed a tax return, putting any correspondence from the Inland Revenue straight into the bin. When the taxman finally caught up with him (while he was fishing), the family were forced to sell their comfortable suburban home and move to Wiltshire – while Richard spent part of his A-level years living above their fishing-tackle shop in Fulham.
At school, he developed passions for wildlife and geology, and excelled in both arts and science, though his headmaster – “a rather fearsome character” – firmly instructed him to study science. But just as Richard was about to sit the Cambridge scholarship exam, his father was killed in a car crash. He did eventually win a place at King’s College to study natural sciences, gaining a first-class degree in 1968. He later received a PhD and DSc, also from the University of Cambridge.
His honours included the Lyell medal of the Geological Society of London (he also served as the society’s president during 2007, its bicentennial year), the Linnean medal for Zoology, four honorary doctorates, and numerous literary prizes. In 2001, Trilobite! was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson (now the Baillie Gifford) prize. In 2008 he received the Royal Society’s Michael Faraday award for science communication.
In 1997, he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society, and in 2023 made an OBE. His nomination noted that “what sets him apart is the range of his work, which bridges the gaps between the sciences and the arts, and enables him to communicate with the professional and the amateur with the same facility”. This was reflected in his election to the Royal Society of Literature in 2009.
His museum colleague Erica McAlister recalls that, long after Fortey’s retirement, his inquisitive mind led him to explore areas outside his academic background, including rearing fungus gnats in his home laboratory during lockdown, and sharing his findings with experts in the field. His research continued to take him to many remote and remarkable places, but he was at his happiest exploring the natural world with family and friends in the Chilterns and Suffolk countryside.
The palaeontologist and science writer Steve Brusatte described him as “the role model many of us looked up to, as both a world-leading research scientist and a writer of the highest calibre. Whenever I write, I try to channel the wit, wisdom, and warmth of Richard Fortey.”
He is survived by his second wife, Jackie (nee Francis), whom he married in 1977, and their children Rebecca, Julia and Leo; by Dominic, the son from his first marriage, to Bridget Thomas, which ended in divorce; by four grandchildren, Herbie, Sophia, Luke and Alice, and his younger sister, Kath.
• Richard Alan Fortey, palaeontologist, writer and TV presenter, born 15 February 1946; died 7 March 2025
