Michael Robert Cooper attended the University of Natal where he graduated B.Sc. in 1969 and B.Sc. Hons in 1970. He joined the South African Museum, Cape Town, in 1971 as the invertebrate palaeontologist, his research focusing chiefly on ammonites, but also working on trilobites and trigoniid bivalves.; during this time, he was awarded his M.Sc. He completed his doctoral studies at Oxford University in 1977, and spent a year as a sectional geologist on Shackleton Mine, Zimbabwe-Rhodesia, after which he returned to Oxford in 1978 on a post-doctoral studentship. He went on to become a palaeontologist at the Queen Victoria Museum in Salisbury, Zimbabwe-Rhodesia, where his research focused mainly on dinosaurs, birds and tortoises, and later joined the University of Durban-Westville in South Africa as a temporary junior lecturer in palaeontology and stratigraphy, where his research focused mainly on stratigraphy, ammonites, bivalves (trigoniids, oysters) and brachiopods. He took early retirement in 2002 as an Emeritus Professor but has continued his work on ammonites and trigoniid bivalves. Since then, he has published three books, and authored 140 scientific publications on such varied topics as Cretaceous and Cainozoic stratigraphy, eustasy and tectonic cycles, ammonites, bivalves, trilobites, brachiopods, dinosaurs, birds, living moths and living cycads.
