Charig was educated at
The Haberdashers' Aske's Boys' School, an independent school (at that time in
Hampstead), and
Emmanuel College, Cambridge. His university education was interrupted by
National Service in the
Royal Armoured Corps, first as a
tank driver and, after volunteering for an Inter-Services Russian language course at
Cambridge, as a Russian
interpreter in Germany, from 1946 to 1948. On graduating in
Zoology in 1951, Charig took a doctorate at
Cambridge, supervised by the late
Francis Rex Parrington. His subject was
Triassic archosaurs of
Tanganyika. After a short spell as lecturer in Zoology in the
Gold Coast (now
Ghana), in 1957 Charig took up a post in
Invertebrate palaeontology at the Natural History Museum. He remained at the museum for the rest of his career, becoming Curator of
Fossil Reptiles and Birds in 1961, and Principal Scientific Officer in 1964. Life at the museum suited Charig well. He enjoyed meeting the public, especially children, and was an entertaining lecturer. He was known to write detailed letters in response to written questions and ideas from member of the public, again particularly children. He wrote and presented a 10-part series on
vertebrate palaeontology,
Before the Ark (1973) on
BBC television, and wrote the accompanying book. His second semi-popular book,
A New Look at the Dinosaurs (1979), had an even greater impact and was translated into several languages. Charig also planned
exhibitions, notably in the museum's Fossil Mammal Gallery between 1970 and 1988. He retained his fluency in Russian from his Army days and gave classes in conversational Russian for his colleagues. Despite long periods of poor health, Charig made many original scholarly contributions to dinosaur science, including an hypothesis to explain the unusual
pelvic structure in plant-eating dinosaurs, which he referred to informally as "the femur-knocking-on-the-pubis problem". In the mid-1980s, he found himself defending the museum's most famous fossil, the earliest known bird,
Archaeopteryx, the authenticity of which was challenged by
Sir Fred Hoyle. Charig responded with a characteristically robust refutation. Charig loved travel; he climbed mountains in
Peru and visited
Timbuktu in a
Morris Minor. He led museum expeditions to
Zambia and
Tanzania in 1963, to
Lesotho in 1966 (discovering the oldest articulated
fossil mammal skeleton in
Early Jurassic rocks), and in 1978 to the
Early Cretaceous of
Queensland (turning up one of the earliest
herrings). A
British Council scheme afforded a privileged visit to China, in 1979. It proved the forerunner of a joint field expedition to
Sichuan in 1982 by the museum and the Institute of Vertebrate Palaeontology and Palaeoanthropology, Beijing. A brick-pit near
Ockley, in
Surrey, England – provided Charig with one of the most notable research project of his career. He excavated
Baryonyx walkeri, a fish-eating dinosaur from the
Early Cretaceous Period. After his retirement in 1987, Charig continued his research work at the Natural History Museum. At this period he also took up a two-month research fellowship awarded by the
Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. In 1995, he went on an arduous tour of
fossil sites throughout
Argentina. His final
scientific publication, a
monograph on the
Surrey dinosaur
Baryonyx, of which he was the senior author, was published at the end of June 1997. At the time of his death, two weeks later, Charig was working on several long-standing projects, notably the description of one of the earliest plant-eating dinosaurs,
Scelidosaurus, from
Dorset, England. A modern description of this genus only materialised in 2020. ==References==