Richard Fortey is a celebrated popular science writer and former senior palaeontologist at the Natural History Museum, London. Richard spent more than 30 years working at the Museum, specialising in trilobites, the distant relatives of crabs and lobsters that lived 260-540 million years ago. He has also been Collier Professor in the Public Understanding of Science and Technologyat Bristol University.His previous books include The Hidden Landscape, which won The Natural World Book of the Year in 1993, Life: An Unauthorised Biography which was shortlisted for the Rhone Poulenc Prize in 1998, Trilobite! Eyewitness to Evolution, which was short-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize, and Dry Store Room No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum. He has won both the Lewis Thomas and Michael Faraday prizes for his science writing, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1997.