Richard
Leakey didn't want to become a paleontologist like his famous
parents, Louis and Mary Leakey, but he made quite a name for himself
after excavating Turkana Boy, the first complete skeleton
of Homo erectus, as well as hundreds of other hominid fossils
in the Turkana Basin in Keyna. He is equally known for his achievements
as an ecologist, and played a major role in the worldwide ban
of the ivory trade. As head of the Kenya Wildlife Service, he
worked to end the poaching of elephants, which had wiped out much
of the elephant herds in his native country. This ultimately helped
to end the ivory trade but it earned him many enemies, especially
from some Kenyan politicians. In 1993 he lost part of both legs
in a small plane crash that some believe was sabotaged. In 1995,
he founded a new political party in Kenya, the Safina Party (which
in Swahili means 'Noah's Ark') dedicated to fighting corruption
in Kenyan politics and promoting greater political freedom. In
2002 joined the Anthropology department at Stony Brook University
in New York, where he is currently a professor, and in 2004 he
founded the nonprofit organization WildlifeDirect to support conservationist
working in Africa. In 1997, Richard Leakey received the prestigious
World Ecology Award presented by the Whitney R. Harris World Ecology
Center.
