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In 2011, after retiring from his role as senior palaeontologist at the Natural History Museum, and following a windfall from presenting a TV series, … - Richard Fortey
" "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 and wood. Located in the , a mile from his hometown of , 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.
English
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About Richard Fortey
(15 February 1946 – 7 March 2025) was an English , and palaeontologist, specialising in s. After graduating with a PhD in geology from the University of Cambridge, he had a long career as curator and palaeontologist at London’s . 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 bestsellers. He was awarded in 2000 the , in 2003 the , and in 2006 both the and the .
Also Known As
Alternative Names:
Richard Alan Fortey
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R. A. Fortey
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Richard A. Fortey
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Fortey
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Additional quotes by Richard Fortey
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!
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.
It was that did it for me. “Dr 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 s of the .
.. A book that starts with slimy things in the oceans and continues to the dawn of human civilisation in the 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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