My friend and former colleague in the department of zoology at Royal Holloway College, University of London, Percy Butler, who has died aged 102, was a distinguished mammalian palaeontologist. He had a remarkably long and fruitful scientific career with a publication record beginning in 1937 and continuing until the present day, with two co-authored papers still in progress at the time of his death.
Son of Herbert, a civil servant, and his wife, Amy, Percy was born in Lewisham, south-east London, and by the age of 10 was filling notebooks with detailed comments and drawings of natural history specimens. At Pembroke College, Cambridge, he graduated and gained his PhD. In the 1930s he made important conclusions concerning the mechanics of teeth, which led to his studies of the evolution and dietary function of fossil mammals of the Mesozoic, work that in turn influenced the studies of many zoologists.
During the second world war, he was employed in examining stored products on ships to determine whether their grain cargoes were infested with insects.
After a spell at Exeter University, he moved to Manchester, where he was an active member of the local natural history society. He introduced a somewhat surprising addition to their interests by instituting a study of pavement ecology, a pursuit that must have caused some puzzlement to the local inhabitants. While at Manchester, he was involved in a study of the entomology of the Spurn peninsula, at the mouth of the Humber, a region whose fauna and structure changed drastically from time to time as a result of flooding.
Percy joined Royal Holloway College in 1956 as reader and head of the department of zoology. There he instituted a course in mammalogy, probably the first in the UK. He retired at 60, but plans for extensive travel were abandoned when his wife, Lilian (nee Temple), whom he had married in 1941, died suddenly.
He turned to full-time research, much of it at the Natural History Museum, London, his last decades being perhaps his most fruitful in research output. Percy was also a talented artist and his many watercolours were seen and admired in a college exhibition of his work.
He was a very modest man and was honoured by several learned societies. In 1986 he received the silver medal of the city of Paris and in 1996, in New York, the prestigious Romer-Simpson medal of the Society of Vertebrate Palaeontology.