15 Facts About Richard Fortey

Richard Alan Fortey 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.

Richard Fortey received a PhD and DSc from the University of Cambridge.

Richard Fortey 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.

Richard Fortey named numerous trilobite species and continued his research after retiring from the Museum.

Richard Fortey studied trilobites and graptolites, especially those from the Ordovician and their systematics, evolution and modes of life; he was 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.

Richard 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.

Richard Fortey contributed to the speculative Discovery Channel documentary series The Future Is Wild.

In 2012, Richard 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, Richard 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.

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

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

Richard Fortey turned his pen to writing dinosaur poems for children and even a spoof book on the Rubik's Cube.

Richard 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.

Richard Fortey has been president of the Palaeontological Association and Palaeontographical Society; in 2009 was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Richard Fortey served on the councils of the Systematics Association; the Royal Society; the Palaeontographical Society ; the British Mycological Society, 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.