Tori Herridge Husband, Children, Parents, Digging for Britain

Tori Herridge Biography – Tori Herridge Wiki

Victoria “Tori” Herridge is a palaeontologist, evolutionary biologist and presenter. She is an evolutionary biologist at the University of Sheffield and a presenter on the BBC Digging for Britain. Her work has taken her from the fossil-rich caves of the Mediterranean islands to the permafrost of Siberia in search of frozen mammoth carcasses.

She is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Biosciences at the University of Sheffield and leads the MSc Science Communications degree. Before that, she did her post-doctoral work at the Natural History Museum in London, funded by NERC, the Leverhulme Trust, and –most recently– as a Daphne Jackson Research Fellow.

Her research addresses big evolutionary and environmental questions using a broad range of lab and field methods, all underpinned by the rich fossil record from the Quaternary Period (aka “The Ice Age”). She is an expert on fossil elephants, particularly those species which lived in Europe during the Ice Age: mammoths and straight-tusked elephants.

Tori is the co-founder of TrowelBlazers, an organisation dedicated to telling the stories of pioneering women in palaeontology, geology and archaeology, and addressing gender disparity in these fields today. She is also the co-founder and joint Editor-in-Chief of the first #openaccess scientific journal for the Quaternary Sciences: Open Quaternary.

She has presented a number of podcasts and TV and Radio programmes, including Digging For Britain for BBC2, BBC Radio 4’s Hoax, the award-winning Wild Crimes, Our Broken Planet, Ice Age: Return of the Mammoth? (Channel 4/Science Channel), Woolly Mammoth The Autopsy (Channel 4/Smithsonian), T. rex Autopsy (National Geographic), Hannibal’s Elephant Army (Channel 4/PBS), as well as the series Bone Detectives, Shoreline Detectives/Britain at Low Tide, and Walking Through Time for Channel 4.

Tori Herridge Age

Victoria Louise “Tori” Herridge was born in April 1980.

Tori Herridge Husband

Digging for Britain presenter Tori Herridge is married with two children.

Tori Herridge Children

Tori Herridge and her husband have two children, daughter R and son P. In 2016, Tori conducted fieldwork at Ghar Dalam Cave in Birżebbuġa, Malta, with her four-month-old baby. She credited the support of her family and colleagues to making doing science as a new mum possible.

In a January 2016 article titled “Fieldwork, family, friendship and feeding,” she wrote: “The support I had from my husband, parents and colleagues made doing fieldwork with a baby in tow an absolute joy.”

She added: “I am privileged to have a partner who was willing (and able, thanks to generous annual leave) to take time off work to take on the bulk of the daytime childcare. I am privileged to be wealthy enough (and have parents who are wealthy enough) to cover the flights and accommodation costs of my family fieldwork entourage.”

Tori Herridge Digging for Britain

Dr Tori Herridge is a presenter on the BBC Digging for Britain, alongside Professor Alice Roberts. She joined the BBC show in its 13th series in 2026. The new series started on BBC2 Wednesday, 7th January 2026, and all episodes are available now on the BBC iPlayer.

“I am beyond thrilled to join the Digging for Britain team and to be part of the UK’s longest-running archaeology programme. It has been such a joy and a privilege to have spent my summer with archaeologists and palaeontologists across the country as they uncover the secrets of our past, and then to share them with you all as part of the new presenting team. But, even more importantly, I am proud to be joining a programme that shows how science is really done – by groups of passionate people, working together to puzzle things out from the evidence.

We never know what discoveries will turn up, or how they might change our understanding of history, until those mattocks and trowels break the ground, and reveal themselves to expert eyes – that is the magic of archaeology, and Digging for Britain lets us all be a part of it. That is what makes it so special.”

Digging for Britain is a popular BBC documentary series that showcases the most exciting archaeological discoveries and excavations happening across the UK each year, revealing new insights into Britain’s past from prehistoric times to the Second World War.