Kenyan fossil hunter and conservationist dies at 77

Richard Leakey, a Kenyan paleoanthropologist and fossil hunter whose discoveries of ancient human skulls and skeletons helped cement Africa’s place as the cradle of humanity, died Sunday in Kenya. He was 77.

President Uhuru Kenyatta of Kenya announced the death in a statement but did not specify a cause. Leakey died at his home outside Nairobi, said professor Lawrence Martin, director of the Turkana Basin Institute at Stony Brook University on Long Island, New York; Leakey was its founder.

Leakey’s parents, Louis and Mary Leakey, were towering figures in paleontology, but Richard was initially determined to steer clear of his parents’ field, finding work instead as a safari guide, before eventually, and perhaps inevitably, succumbing to fossil fever.

A turning point came on a flight in 1967, when he looked down over the rocky shores of Lake Turkana in Kenya and had, by his account, a feeling that the area could yield a trove of fossils. He was right.

The fossils found there by Leakey and his “Hominid Gang,” as he and his colleagues came to be known, would change the world’s understanding of human evolution.

One of his most celebrated finds came in 1984 when he helped unearth “Turkana Boy,” a 1.6-million-year-old skeleton of a young male Homo erectus. The other was a skull called “1470,” found in 1972, that extended the world’s knowledge of the Homo erectus species several million years deeper into the past.

“He was a mentor to dozens of Africans in diverse fields and had played a key role in shaping the world’s view on Africa’s place in the human evolution story,” WildlifeDirect, the organization he founded, said in a statement Sunday.

But Leakey was important for more than finding fossils, said professor John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; he was also credited with “creating an entire scientific, interdisciplinary infrastructure that enabled discoveries” and established a new model for scientific research, Hawks said.

Leakey’s discoveries landed him on the cover of Time magazine in 1977. He starred in a 1981 BBC program, “The Making of Mankind,” which was also the title of one of his many books.

He parlayed his fossil hunter fame into a public-minded career. Among his roles were Kenya’s head of public service, the director of the National Museums of Kenya and the chairman of the board of the Kenya Wildlife Service, Kenyatta said in his statement.

“He had equally impactful careers in so many different areas,” Martin said, adding that Leakey “has probably been responsible for producing close to half of the world’s evidence for human evolution.”