Michael Benton

Benton is a palaeontologist who has made fundamental contributions to understanding the history of life, particularly concerning how biodiversity changes through time. He has led in integrating data from living and fossil organisms to generate phylogenies — solutions to the question of how major groups originated and diversified through time.

Benton was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2014 for “substantial contributions to the improvement of natural knowledge” and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE).

This approach has revolutionised our understanding of major questions, including the relative roles of internal and external drivers on the history of life, whether diversity reaches saturation, the significance of mass extinctions, and how major clades radiate. A key theme is the Permian–Triassic extinction event, the largest mass extinction of all time, which took place over 250 million years ago, where he investigates how life was able to recover from such a devastating event.

Benton has also been contributing in some documentaries. One of these was BBCs 2002 program The Day The Earth Nearly Died, which feature scientists and deals with the mysteries of the Permian extinction. In December 2010, Benton had a rhynchosaur (Bentonyx) named in his honour. His work has been published in a variety of journals.

Michael has written engaging books for children on the theme of dinosaurs, as well as a significant number of palaeontology text books for university students. He founded the Master of Science degree program in Palaeobiology at Bristol in 1996, from which more than 300 students have graduated. He has supervised more than 50 PhD students.

Benton was educated at Robert Gordon's College, the University of Aberdeen and Newcastle University where he was awarded a PhD in 1981.

Michael James Benton FRS FRSE (born 8 April 1956) is a British palaeontologist, and professor of vertebrate palaeontology in the School of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol. His published work has mostly concentrated on the evolution of Triassic reptiles but he has also worked on extinction events and faunal changes in the fossil record.