Richard Fortey

Richard Fortey was a senior paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in London. His previous books include the critically acclaimed Life: A Natural History of the First Four Billion Years of Life on Earth, short-listed for the Rhône-Poulenc Prize in 1998; Trilobite: Eyewitness to Evolution, short-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2001; and The Hidden Landscape: A Journey into the Geological Past, which won the Natural World Book of the Year in 1993. He was Collier Professor in the Public Understanding of Science and Technology at the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Bristol in 2002. In 2003, he won the Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing About Science from Rockefeller University. He has been a Fellow of the Royal Society since 1997.