Fossil hunting was a slightly more esoteric pastime, but what is perhaps most telling about Fortey’s childhood was his awakening to s. Today there is… - Richard Fortey
" "Fossil hunting was a slightly more esoteric pastime, but what is perhaps most telling about Fortey’s childhood was his awakening to s. 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.
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
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.
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!
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