M. Paul Smith is a British palaeontologist, head of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History and professor in Kellogg College.

Previously he was Professor of Palaeobiology at the University of Birmingham, head of the university's School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, and Director of its Lapworth Museum of Geology.

Smith's research primarily has focused on the conodont palaeobiology and the early Palaeozoic radiation of vertebrates.

He is known for discovering that conodont teeth were made of bone cells, such as are found only in vertebrates.

Telling the Evolutionary Time: Molecular Clocks and the Fossil Record.