Richard O. Prum is the William Robertson Coe Professor of Ornithology at Yale University and the Curator of Ornithology in the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History. He is an evolutionary ornithologist with broad interests in avian biology.

A life-long birdwatcher, Richard has researched many topics in bird biology including avian phylogeny, behavioural evolution, feather development and evolution, structural coloration, sexual selection and the dinosaur origin of birds.

Richard has conducted fieldwork on birds on all the continents and has studied fossil theropods in China. In 2017, he published The Evolution of Beauty, which was named one of the Top Ten Books of the Year by the New York Times and was a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in General Non-Fiction. Richard has been awarded MacArthur, Guggenheim, and Fulbright Fellowships.

The Evolution of Beauty