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Richard Fortey

British paleontologist

Richard Alan Fortey OBE (born 15 February 1946) is an English science writer, science communicator, and palaeontologist, specialising in trilobites. After graduating with a PhD in geology from the University of Cambridge, he had a long career as curator and palaeontologist at London’s Natural History Museum. He was elected in 1997 a Fellow of the Royal Society and in 2007 President of the Geological Society of London. Two of his books became Sunday Times bestsellers. He was awarded in 2000 the Frink Medal, in 2003 the Lewis Thomas Prize, and in 2006 both the Michael Faraday Prize and the Linnean Medal.

Quotes

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  • Collecting a pile of fossils is only the beginning. Many fossils are only fragments of the whole animal or plant. To piece together the whole organism is rather like doing a jigsaw puzzle without the benefit of the complete picture to work towards. Piece has to be added to piece, and the larger and more fragmentary the animal the more the result is in question. Not surprisingly mistakes have been made. The first reconstruction of the dinosaur Iguanodon finished up with its thumb on its nose!
  • ... Time piles rock upon rock. The sea comes and goes with the passing geological ages. Unless other events intervened, my trilobite would have become interred within an ever deeper pile of sediments, to a depth possibly beyond the deepest coal seam, and buried into an obscurity from which it would never emerge. But often in geology that which is buried is destined to rise. Phases of mountain building throw up rocks that were once deep beneath the surface. The British isles have been through no fewer than three such phases since my trilobite scuttled about on the sea floor. The first of these — the great Caledonian convulsion — was responsible for disinterring my fossil.
  • … if you look back into history, the way the world has divided up into, say, linguistic groups, cultural groups, is ultimately under the control of geology. So, for example, think of the differences between the peoples north and south of the Himalayas.
    It’s extremely hard for people to cross – even the individual valleys within the Himalayas have cultural differences. Their history has been controlled to a large extent by those barriers. That’s a great control.
    But even on a small scale, the way cities looked – you know, the kind of cities that could be built – was controlled by the rocks that underlay it. For example, you could build tower blocks in New York because you had that nice, firm metamorphic rock to drive your piles down into. And the particular building stones are what have given, well, let’s say the majority of French cities and towns their own peculiar and interesting flavor. So geology controls the character of the world to a large extent.
  • The public galleries take up much less than half of the space of the Natural History Museum. Tucked away, mostly out of view, there is a warren of corridors, obsolete galleries, offices, libraries and above all, collections. This is the natural habitat of the curator. It is where I have spent a large part of my life—indeed, the Natural History Museum provides a way of life as distinctive as that of a monastery. Most people in the world at large know very little about this unique habitat. This is the world I shall reveal.
  • The trilobites, of course, overall have a fantastic variety of morphologies — fantastic variety of shapes. So you would expect them to have many different sorts of life habits.
  • One horseshoe crab lies upturned on the sand. Its tail sake waggles feebly, quite unable to perform the task of turning the body back over again. Five paris of legs twitch ineffectually in a vain attempt to achieve the same end. I find it impossible to resist the temptation to right the poor animal. It is easy to grasp it by the edges of the head-shield. Once righted again those spindly legs allow the crab to trundle slowly away. Its behaviour seem at once strangely determined, but also apparently random, like the slow progress of a confused old lady on a Zimmer frame.

About Richard Fortey

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  • Fossil hunting was a slightly more esoteric pastime, but what is perhaps most telling about Fortey’s childhood was his awakening to toadstools. Today there is a whole library of richly illustrated guides and scholarly works on mushrooms. The fungus foray is a popular activity offered for public participation up and down the country. Yet when Fortey did it there were no teachers and the only widely available book was The Observer’s Book of Common Fungi. It covered 200 of the many thousands of British species. Fungi, in short, are difficult.
    The author tells us he remains an amateur enthusiast, but it is a mark of his ability that he describes how, in 2006, he found a tiny fungus Ceriporiopsis herbicola new to science. The discovery of entirely unknown organisms happens to few, but it happens in Britain to almost none. You realise that a challenge in this funny and entertaining book is peeling back the curtain of the author’s self-deprecation.
  • In 2011, after retiring from his role as senior palaeontologist at the Natural History Museum, and following a windfall from presenting a TV series, Fortey purchased four acres of prime beech and bluebell wood. Located in the Chiltern Hills, a mile from his hometown of Henley-on-Thames, Grim’s Dyke Wood is the very patch that had Mill so enraptured two centuries ago. Though it has changed in the intervening years, it is still a glorious spot – Fortey’s initial intention was to use the wood as a way to “escape into the open air”, to record a rich ecology of living wildlife following a career locked away in dusty museums studying dead things. He soon realised, however, that any portrait of the place would be incomplete without its human histories, too.
  • … Trilobite expert, tiddlywinks player, mushroom hunter, poetry enthusiast and ardent lover of the museum, Fortey joined the staff of the paleontology department in 1970. He tells us that at the time he joined, the museum was so hierarchical that there were separate lavatories for “scientific officers” and “gentlemen.” (Both, however, were supplied with toilet paper that had “Government Property” stamped on each sheet.)
  • It was Mr Magoo that did it for me. “Dr Rousseau H. Flower was an eccentric in the grand manner … he always wore hand-tooled cowboy boots with elaborate curlicues in the stitching and a hat and jacket to match. He was very shortsighted, and tended to stumble along in the purposeful way adopted by the cartoon character Mr Magoo, while mumbling vigorously to himself.”
    The Magoo lookalike also carries a whip and a six-shooter, but that is not what matters most about him: what matters is that he was an expert on the nautiloids of the Ordovician.
    .. A book that starts with slimy things in the pre-Cambrian oceans and continues to the dawn of human civilisation in the Fertile Crescent must offer more than just a procession of challenging concepts and unfamiliar words, and accordingly up pops Mr Magoo, with whom Fortey (himself big on the trilobites of the Ordovician) once shared a hotel room.
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