The map on the hotel wall said “Good fossils here”, so Richard Fortey, then 14, did not hesitate. He seized his geologist’s hammer, braved the gorse and got down to the beach. It was a typical British summer, when even the Pembrokeshire coast looked dreary; but he was in heaven, whacking limestone rocks. Nothing much turned up until suddenly, at a blow from his hammer, one came in half in his hands. It broke perfectly, as if made for him. And there in one half was a trilobite, its thin eyes gazing up at him. Across 500m years, thrilled to the marrow, he gazed back.
He did not need telling what it was. As an ever-curious boy, roaming woods and river banks as his father fished, he read up on everything he saw: the older, the stranger, the better. Trilobites were extinct arthropods, ancestors of spiders and crabs and ancient cousins to woodlice, which had flourished between the start of the Cambrian era and the end of the Permian, 250m years ago. Most were from two to six centimetres long; the one he had found exactly fitted into the palm of his hand. Most scuttled on the floors of silent seas, but some swam in deeper water. The soft ventral side rarely survived in fossil form, though on the best examples there were hints of gills and multiple jointed legs. What made them a great fossil-find was their three-lobed exoskeleton made of calcite and their hard, variously ornamented heads; and in those heads, the most astonishing compound calcite eyes.
The eyes did it; trilobites became his obsession. From Ealing Grammar School to King’s Cambridge to the Natural History Museum in London, he went in search of more. On a trip to Spitsbergen, inadequately clad as usual, he became the fortuitous owner of more than 100 lovely ones, all new to science. At the museum, he earned a rebuke early on for work-diary entries reading only “Studied trilobites”. Yet he rose to be senior palaeontologist, emperor of an immense collection of carefully labelled animal bits compressed and aged into stone. At 60 he retired, but the passion burned on. New sorts of trilobites simply kept turning up. In older age he studied the younger ones—the merely-250m-year-olds—which were often found rolled into balls, as they burrowed into mud to try to survive the Permian mass-extinction. They had become little pearls, and were absolutely beautiful.
What fascinated him most was their visual system, the first in the fossil record to be really well preserved. The eyes of some trilobites contained more than 15,000 calcite lenses; they looked through crystal at a world of fragmented light. Some had a field of view that was almost 360 degrees. Others, living closer to the surface, sported a sort of eye-shade. To see what they saw, he imagined scuba-diving among them. The water and sea floor would be full of them: dinner-plate size, shrimp-size, smaller than peas. Some were smooth, some fantastically bespined; others had what looked like spatulas or tridents on their heads. Scuttling on the sea floor, they could spot and shred annelid worms. Through clouds of stirred-up mud and seaweed groves they could glimpse predators approaching.
Dr Fortey was determined that non-scientists, too, should hear the trilobites’ story. He wanted to transport them to a scene of ancient seas and fiery volcanoes churning up the rocks. A good chunk of his career was spent writing about trilobites or presenting TV programmes for the public. He deliberately made his books not only funny but full of anecdote and poetry, which he also liked to write himself. “Trilobite!”, his most famous work, opened by evoking Thomas Hardy on the north Cornish coast. And amid the mysteries of the trilobite world he kept in mind John Dryden’s lines: “How can the less the Greater comprehend?/Or finite reason reach Infinity?”
Trilobites were not only poetry to him. They were also useful. Because he could detect where different species lived, in the open sea or at the shoreline, he could map the ancient edges of continents. It was known that modern continents had split off from a single land-mass; but not that separate continents had existed before that land-mass formed. Through trilobites, like postage stamps, he fixed their positions and remade the prehistoric globe. Proudly, when a fellow-commuter on the 6.21 to Henley asked what he had done that day, he replied that he had moved north Africa 200km to the east.
He did not stop there. Another early love was fungi, ever since watching a clump of glistening ink caps in the garden turn slowly into black soup. The sheer variety of fungi, their shapes and colours, tastes and reputations, soon grew into “Close Encounters of the Fungal Kind”. One especially spooky meeting came in New South Wales, when an edible oyster mushroom (as he thought) began to glow at night with a ghostly, poisonous light. In retirement he set up a mycology lab at the top of his house to breed fungus gnats. Since each fungus could feed 100 gnats, which in turn fed dozens of insectivores, their place in the food chain was under-appreciated. His place in the chain was to come back from walks with a basketful of puffballs and horse mushrooms.
From 2011 his greatest joy was his wood: four acres of beeches and bluebells in the Chilterns, called Grim’s Dyke Wood, which he bought with money from a TV series. This soon became another project, namely, to catalogue everything found there and to track all the years of its history, from wild timber to furniture-making to threats from Russian oligarchs. His observations made another book, and his finds were displayed in a cabinet of beechwood from the plot. Most were ordinary enough: flints, papery egg-shells, cherry stones. But nothing was ever ordinary to this naturalist, as he preferred to call himself. He was always the boy who lifted up stones to see what might be crawling underneath. And the boy who, on that Welsh beach, had suddenly found a trilobite gazing up at him. ■
Correction (March 24th 2025): The original version of this piece erroneously said that at the end of the Permian era there were no trees or animals.