There he worked on dinosaurs and their immediate Triassic ancestors, but also studied creatures as varied as limbless amphisbaenians (worm-lizards) and a Fijian gastropod, Thatcheria.
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.
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.
However, the next year, a rather less exotic location – a brick-pit near Ockley, in Surrey, England – provided Charig with the most exciting research project of his career.
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.