Victoria Herridge

Victoria Louise "Tori" Herridge, born 1980, is a palaeontologist at the Natural History Museum in London and one of the founders of TrowelBlazers, which celebrates women archaeologists, palaeontologists and geologists.

Victoria Louise "Tori" Herridge
Occupation	Palaeontologist

Career

Herridge graduated with a first class degree in biology from University College London in 2002. After a master's degree at Imperial College London, she returned to University College London to gain a doctorate with a thesis titled "Dwarf Elephants on Mediterranean Islands: A Natural Experiment in Parallel Evolution". Her research addressed evolution of island mammals during the Pleistocene period and their responses to extreme climate change.^[1][2] She is a founding editor-in-chief at the open access journal Open Quaternary.^[3]

Science communication

Herridge delivered the 2012 Charles Lyell Award lecture at the British Science Festival^[4] and co-wrote Who Do You Think You Really Are? for the Natural History Museum. The film was a Premier Award Winner in 2011. As well as her academic output she is a popular science writer: her work includes a piece on the ethics of cloning mammoths versus the importance of saving endangered elephants, and one on the importance of studying the history of women in science (with Brenna Hassett, Suzanne Pilaar Birch and Becky Wragg Sykes), both published in The Guardian.^[5][6]

In November 2014 Herridge co-presented the Channel 4 documentary about the autopsy of the Maly Lyakhovsky Mammoth (aka "Buttercup").^[7] She presented the 2016 Channel 4 series Walking Through Time and co-presented three series of Britain at Low Tide (2016, 2018 and 2019; series 1 with archaeologist Alex Langlands).^[8][9] In January 2020 she presented Bone Detectives: Britain's Buried Secrets on Channel 4.^[10]

References

1. Herridge, Victoria; Lister, A.M. (2012). "Extreme insular dwarfism evolved in a mammoth". Proceedings of the Royal Society B. 279 (1741): 3193–3200. doi:10.1098/rspb.2012.0671. PMC 3385739. PMID 22572206.
2. "Dwarfism in Animals on Islands". The Geological Society. 11 September 2013. Retrieved 21 October 2021.
3. "Editorial Team". Open Quaternary. Retrieved 21 October 2021.
4. . Geoscience Lines. 29 August 2012. Archived from the original on 12 November 2013. Retrieved 23 June 2014.
5. Herridge, Tori (18 November 2014). "Mammoths are a huge part of my life. But cloning them is wrong". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 14 November 2019.
6. Hassett, Brenna; Birch, Suzanne Pilaar; Sykes, Becky Wragg; Herridge, Victoria (8 March 2017). "The history of women in science shows us the fight is worth it". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 21 October 2021.
7. . Channel 4. 23 November 2014. Archived from the original on 4 December 2017. Retrieved 21 October 2021.
8. "Britain at Low Tide". Channel 4. Retrieved 21 October 2021.
9. . Channel 4. 15 June 2016. Archived from the original on 27 September 2016. Retrieved 26 September 2016.
10. "Bone Detectives: Britain's Buried Secrets". Channel 4. Retrieved 21 October 2021.

External links

• Official website