Dick Jefferies obituary

My friend Dick Jefferies, who has died aged 88, was an authority on fossils that are too strange to identify and which are sometimes referred to as “problematica”. Central to his work, which he pursued as principal scientific officer in the natural history section of the British Museum, were extinct animals called carpoids.

Dick was something of a contrarian in the field of evolutionary biology, and was not afraid to adopt occasionally outlandish positions, some of which were proven to be well wide of the mark. However, a number of his predictions did turn out to be correct. He successfully hypothesised, for instance, that early marine animals (echinoderms) had gill slits equivalent to those of fish, but lost them; and he was also proven right in his conjecture that the closest relatives of vertebrates were sea-squirts (ascidiacea), rather than the more fish-like lancelets (amphioxus).

Born in Croydon, Surrey, Dick was the son of Alice (nee Spencer) a chiropodist, and her husband, Albert, a cobbler. His love of natural history was nurtured during wartime evacuation to the Sussex downs, and after Selhurst grammar school he went to Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge, where he completed a degree in geology and then a PhD.

He married Beryl Towl in 1960 after they had met at a Fabian Society meeting. Following a stint as a geologist with British Iranian Petroleum he joined the natural history section of the British Museum, initially as a scientific officer, later rising to be principal scientific officer and staying there until his retirement in 1992.

Fluent in six languages, he translated into English the book Phylogenetische Systematik, by the East German entomologist Willi Hennig, which was a key source material for cladistics, the method of generating evolutionary family trees that swept the board in the 1970s and is now considered orthodox.

Beryl died in 1989, and the following year Dick married the writer Audrey Millar. She died in 2018. A son, Robert, was killed in a cycling accident in 2011. He is survived by his two other sons, Thomas and William, and three grandchildren, Theo, Alex, Eve and Louise.