Richard Fortey FRS (born 1946 in London) is a British palaeontologist and writer, formerly a Merit Researcher at the Natural History Museum in London. Since 1997 he has been a Fellow of the Royal Society.

Fortey studies trilobites and graptolites, especially those from the Ordovician, and their systematics, evolution and modes of life. He is also involved in research on Ordovician palaeogeography and correlation; arthropod evolution, especially the origin of major groups; and the relationships between divergence times as revealed by molecular evidence and the fossil record.

He has won the Lewis Thomas Prize for science writing. In 1993, Fortey's The Hidden Landscape was named the Natural World Book of the Year.

Professor Fortey has been elected President of the Geological Society of London for its bicentennial year of 2007.

BOOKS:

• The Hidden Landscape (1993)
• Life: An Unauthorised Biography. A Natural History of the First Four Billion Years of Life on Earth (1997)
• Trilobite: Eyewitness to Evolution (2000)
• Fossils: The Key to the Past (2002)
• The Earth: An Intimate History (2004)

Tom Steinberg is the founder and director of  mySociety, a charitable body that runs many of the best-known democracy websites in the UK, from WriteToThem.com, to PledgeBank.com to the volunteer-founded TheyWorkForYou.com to the No.10 e-petitions website. mySociety's missions are to build websites that give people simple, tangible benefits in the democratic and community aspects of their lives, and which teach the public and voluntary sector how they can use technology better to help citizens.

By trade Tom was a policy analyst and general 'wonk' who mainly cut his teeth at the Prime Minister's Strategy Unit.

His most recent publication is The Power of Information review, co-authored with Ed Mayo and the Strategy Unit.