Rate My Professor R. Ewan Fordyce

R. Ewan Fordyce was Professor of Geology in the Department of Geology, University of Otago, serving from 1982 until his retirement in 2022. He obtained his BSc (Hons) in Zoology in 1974 and PhD in Zoology in 1978 from the University of Canterbury. After postdoctoral fellowships at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C., and Monash University, Melbourne, Fordyce joined Otago, where he headed the Department for five years, was promoted to Professor in 2011, and became Emeritus Professor. An elected Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand (FRSNZ) in 2014, he received the Hutton Medal in 2012 for seminal contributions to New Zealand vertebrate paleontology, the Geoscience Society of New Zealand McKay Hammer in 2019, and the Riversleigh Medal for excellence in promoting understanding of Australasian prehistory that same year. Fordyce edited the Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand for many years and supervised around 50 PhD and postgraduate students.

Fordyce's research focused on paleontology, particularly the morphology, taxonomy, systematics, and phylogeny of Cetacea—whales, dolphins, and porpoises—as well as penguins, sharks, bony fishes, marine reptiles, and microfossil biostratigraphy. He authored over 200 publications, including studies on the 34-million-year-old baleen whale Llanocetus denticrenatus, which he discovered in 1987 on Seymour Island, Antarctica, with key papers such as the 2018 analysis of its dentition. He also identified the giant penguin Kairuku from a South Canterbury fossil. Fordyce collected thousands of fossils, enhancing Otago's collections displayed in the Geology Museum and establishing the university's paleontology program as New Zealand's most productive. He contributed to the 2019 Marsden Fund project on Miocene whale and dolphin evolution and supported the Waitaki Whitestone UNESCO Geopark. Fordyce passed away in November 2023, prompting the creation of the R. Ewan Fordyce Paleontology Fund.