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Paleoanthropologist, author, conservationist and professor Richard Leakey has many fascinating stories to tell. There is the one about growing up in Kenya, as the child of famed paleontologists Louis and Mary Leakey. Richard found his first fossil at age six, the jaw of an extinct giant pig.
And there are his discoveries. In 1984, in Kenya, he and his team made a miraculous find: the nearly complete 1.6 million year old skeleton of "Turkana Boy," a young male homo erectus. His 1992 book, "Origins Reconsidered" describes this monumental, history-changing discovery and a subsequent find of a skull that points to a previously unknown extinct hominid.
Leakey's efforts leading East African conservation, recounted in another book of his, 2001's "Wildlife Wars: My Battle to Save Kenya's Elephants," were remarkable but controversial with some sectors in Kenya. He retired in 2001 but continues to support conservation in Africa, among other causes. He currently teaches anthropology at Stony Brook University in New York.
Hear this famous scientist and conservationist at Greenwich Library on October 26, at 7 p.m., when he describes why some of his enthralling experiences have also been world changing. The event is free and takes place in the Cole Auditorium.
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