Howard Barraclough Fell (June 6, 1917 – April 21, 1994), better known as Barry Fell, was a professor of invertebrate zoology at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology. While his primary professional research included starfish and sea urchins, Fell is best known for his pseudoarchaeological work in New World epigraphy, arguing that various inscriptions in the Americas are best explained by extensive pre-Columbian contact with Old World civilizations. His writings on epigraphy and archaeology are generally rejected by those mainstream scholars who have considered them. Biography Fell was born in Lewes, Sussex, England, and was a grandson of the railway engineer and inventor John Barraclough Fell. He moved with his mother to New Zealand in the early 1920s after his father, who was a merchant seaman, died in a shipboard fire. He returned to the British Isles for graduate work, receiving his Ph.D. at the University of Edinburgh in 1941. Fell then served with the British Army during World War II. In 1946 he returned to New Zealand, where he resumed his academic career, and lectured in zoology at Victoria University of Wellington. A world authority on fossil sea urchins, he supervised a number of students including Helen E.S. Clark and they published a number of studies on Antarctic seastars. He was recruited by Harvard University in 1964, and emigrated to the United States to join the staff of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard where he worked until retirement in 1979. He died of heart failure in San Diego, California, aged 77, while discussing a new book with his publisher. Epigraphy Although Fell was an accomplished marine biologist at Harvard University, he is best known for three books which claim that many centuries before Christopher Columbus reached America, Celts, Basques, Phoenicians, Egyptians, and others were visiting North America. His interest in inscriptions began early in his career with a study of Polynesian petroglyphs published in 1940, but his most famous work came much later, starting in 1976 with his publication of America B.C., in which he proposed translations of inscriptions found on rock surfaces and artifacts in North and South America which he believed to be written in Old World scripts and languages. He followed up this work in 1980 with Saga America and in 1982 with Bronze Age America. Fell's epigraphic work was not well received in academia. Critics of Fell's work routinely dismissed him as an