[4] He went to the University of Birmingham for post-doctoral work, and was appointed lecturer in the Department of Zoology and Comparative physiology in 1959.
He worked for a year at Harvard Medical School then returned to Birmingham as a senior lecturer in 1968, a position he held until 1987.
From 1996 to 2000 he was a consultant at the University of Warwick, jointly to the Ecosystems Unit of the Biology Dept and the Mathematics Institute.
He published in prestigious journals such as Nature and wrote textbooks such as Living Embryos – an Introduction to the Study of Animal Development (1967) and Reproduction (1977).
The writers who acknowledged his assistance included Anne McCaffrey for the Dragonriders of Pern; Harry Harrison for his Eden trilogy; Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle and Steven Barnes for their Legacy of Heorot; James White of Sector General fame;[8] David Gerrold for the Chtorr ecology; and Terry Pratchett for several works.
[9] He was one of the small group of British Mensans who persuaded science fiction author Isaac Asimov to visit the United Kingdom in June 1974.