Michael Benton was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 2014 for his fundamental contributions to understanding the history of life, particularly biodiversity fluctuations through time. He is fascinated by the transformation of palaeobiology from a speculative subject to testable science and led one of these discoveries – how to determine the colour of dinosaurs, rated as one of the top scientific discoveries of the 2010s. He works with fossils and rocks to interpret ancient environments, especially around the end-Permian mass extinction, the greatest loss of life on Earth, some 250 million years ago. He also works with fossils to build evolutionary trees and use them to date major events and rates and patterns of evolution, so helping us understand why some groups of animals are more successful than others. He is currently working on the Triassic, the time during which life recovered from the end-Permian mass extinction and when modern ecosystems arose; this was a time of arms races between major groups, and dinosaurs won. Michael Benton has written some 400 scientific papers and more than 50 books on a broad range of palaeontological topics. He has supervised more than 70 PhD students, and was founder of the Bristol MSc in Palaeobiology, which has welcomed 400 students since its foundation, in 1996. His latest books are new editions of the standard textbooks in palaeontology, Cowen’s History of Life (Wiley, 2019) and Introduction to Paleobiology and the Fossil Record (with David Harper, Wiley, 2020), as well as a presentation on the transition of palaeobiology from speculation to science over the past 30 years, Dinosaurs Rediscovered (Thames & Hudson, 2019, 2020).