RICHARD FORTEY, Leverhulme Fellow and Research Association at the Natural History Museum
Dry Store Room No. 1 - The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum
Date/Time: 19th March 2009, 17:30
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In his lecture, based upon his widely praised new book, Richard Fortey will take us behind the scenes of the Natural History Museum and celebrate its remarkable collections and also the equally remarkable, and sometimes eccentric, scholars, scientists, and cataloguers who assembled and worked on the material, including a colleague who passion for collecting and classification led him to label a box 'pieces of string too small to be of use'.
Richard Fortey studied at Cambridge University, where he received his bachelor’s degree in 1968 and his Doctor of Philosophy degree three years later. He is a palaeontologist, and one of the world authorities on trilobites - extinct arthropods that were one of the dominant life forms in the Palaeozoic Era. For most of his working life he was employed in the Natural History Museum in London, where he achieved the highest research grade. Concerning trilobites he has published several hundred scientific papers in international journals, and in recognition of his scientific distinction he has received the Lyell Medal of the Geological Society of London, the Frink Medal of the Zoological Society of London and the Linnean Medal for Zoology. He has been president of the Palaeontological Association and the Geological Society of London in its bicentenary year 2007. Richard Fortey was elected to the Royal Society in 1997. He is known equally for his science writing, which marries personal observation and poetic prose with the latest scientific research. Of his six books, Life: an unauthorised biography (1996) has been translated into twelve languages and cited as one of the Books of the Year by the New York Times. All of his books have been shortlisted for literary prizes, and he has spoken at dozens of major literary festivals in Britain and Europe. For his work in popularising science Richard Fortey has been given Honorary Fellowship of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and been awarded the Michael Faraday Prize of the Royal Society (2006) and the Lewis Thomas Prize of Rockefeller University, New York (2003). He has been Collier Professor in the Public Understanding of Science and Technology at Bristol University and Visiting Professor of Palaeobiology at Oxford University. His latest book, Dry Store Room No 1, is an exploration of museum culture from the perspective of an insider. Bill Bryson has said of him: “Fortey is without peer among science writers”. He is married with three children, and lives in the countryside where he can indulge his interest in wild mushrooms.