Richard Alan Fortey

Photograph of Richard Fortey. Richard Fortey attended the University of Cambridge as an undergraduate, where an opportunity to visit a remote part of Spitsbergen as a field assistant set the course of his career as a palaeontologist. There he collected an extraordinary range of new trilobites of Ordovician age, which led him to remain at Cambridge to investigate them as a doctoral student. Fortey joined the Natural History Museum in London before he had completed his PhD, and he spent the rest of his career there. He wrote a three-volume monograph on the Spitsbergen trilobites while embarking on wider research on the group. He was the first to use computed cladistic methods to determine trilobite relationships. He modernized their classification and inferred their life habits based on anatomical features. Fortey showed how the distribution of fossils, particularly trilobites, allowed the configuration of continents during the Ordovician to be reconstructed. He led an updated correlation of the Ordovician rocks of the British Isles and served on the International Subcommission that established the global time scale for the period. Fortey extended his work on the relationships of fossil arthropods to challenge the hypothesis that the animals from the Burgess Shale represent extinct phyla and he contributed to the debate about the nature of the Cambrian ‘explosion’. He championed the importance of natural history collections and of taxonomic expertise in monitoring the decline of biodiversity and he brought Earth science, palaeontology and even fungi to public attention in his multiple books and his presentation of natural history series on BBC4 television.