A TIME magazine cover featured Leakey under the headline

A TIME magazine cover featured Leakey under the headline 

“How Man Became Man”. In 1981, he took part in a BBC television series named The Making of Mankind.

Richard Leakey's most famous unearthing was that in 1984 of the so-called Turkana Boy, a near-complete homo erectus skeleton, which is now on display at Kenya's national museum in Nairobi. It is around 1.6 million years old it is believed he was aged about eight when he died.

In the late 1980s Leakey also led the fight against the then legal global ivory trade. President Daniel Arap Moi in 1989 appointed him to lead the national wildlife agency, which later changed its name to Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS). He then ordered 12 tons of tusks be burnt to make the point that they have no value once removed from elephants and issued a shoot-to-kill order against armed poachers.