My name is Richard Fortey
and for many years I was the trilobite
expert at the Natural History Museum
in London,
and now I'm Emeritus
but still have my office there.
I'm going to tell you about my favourite
trilobite,
which is this specimen in this little
leather bag.
I was presented it.
I was given it by Sir James Stubblefield,
who was Director of the British
Geological Survey and, in his day,
a famous trilobite man.
He died aged about 100 and,
to my pleasure and surprise,
I received this trilobite in his will,
together with the story accompanying
the trilobite,
because Stubblefield himself had been
left it by a man called Hawkins,
who was a renowned authority on
sea urchins in his day,
and Hawkins had been in the
First World War.
Accompanying the specimen was a
letter, now a bit faded,
from the then keeper or head of
Palaeontology
in the Natural History Museum,
to Hawkins.
And Hawkins, at the time,
was in the trenches in France in the
First World War,
and the letter went something as
follows.
"My dear Hawkins, I am thinking of you
now in a very vulnerable position,
and I wish I could present to you with
armour to keep you safe, which I cannot.
But I can send you the carapace of my
favourite trilobite, and that's this one,
Calymene blumenbachii,
in the hope that it will keep you safe.
And it did, because Hawkins came back
and became a renowned professor
and expert on sea urchins.
And in his time, due time,
Hawkins passed the trilobite onto
Sir James Stubblefield,
and Stubblefield eventually passed
it on to me.
So, it's a very precious object.
And, well, I hope
that it has a little charm attached to it
because, a few years ago,
I wrote a book called Trilobite! -
with an exclamation mark -
all about trilobites and how they live,
and I was lucky enough to be picked to
go on Start the Week
with Jeremy Paxman,
which, of course, always sets off a little
flutter in your heart.
And you get a few minute warm-up time
before the programme,
and I noticed that I was going to be with
the famously acerbic novelist, Will Self,
I was getting a bit worried and nervous.
But I did have, in my pocket,
my lucky charm, the trilobite,
and just before going onto the
programme,
I took it out and I showed it to
Jeremy Paxman saying,
"you probably haven't seen a
trilobite before."
And he took some interest in it.
And I noticed, as we were walking in, he
took my book from the bottom of the pile
and put it on the top of the pile.
So, maybe the trilobite charm had
worked once again,
a century after the First World War.
