Biography
Fell was born in Lewes, Sussex, England, and was a grandson of the railway engineer and inventor John Barraclough Fell. He moved with his mother to New Zealand in the early 1920s after his father, who was a merchant seaman, died in a shipboard fire.
He returned to the British Isles for graduate work, receiving his Ph.D. at the University of Edinburgh in 1941. Fell then served with the British Army during World War II. In 1946 he returned to New Zealand, where he resumed his academic career, and lectured in zoology at Victoria University of Wellington.
A world authority on fossil sea urchins, he was recruited by Harvard University in 1964, and emigrated to the United States to join the staff of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Havard where he worked until retirement in 1979.
He died of heart failure in San Diego, California, aged 77, while discussing a new book with his publisher.
Read more about this topic: Barry Fell
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