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OAKLAND — J. Desmond Clark, an anthropologist and African fossil hunter, has died. He was 85. 

Clark, who had been in good health and had just returned from a trip to England with his wife, died Thursday of pneumonia at an Oakland convalescent home, University of California, Berkeley officials said. 

“Clark was legendary,” said Tim D. White, one of his colleagues at UC Berkeley. “He towered above anybody else in African archaeology with his breadth and depth of knowledge about the rise and development of prehistoric culture. His death leaves an enormous void.” 

Clark, a professor emeritus at UC Berkeley, made several expeditions to India, China and Africa throughout his career. 

There he and his colleagues made discoveries of creatures known as hominids, which preceded the emergence of modern Homo sapiens by millions of years. While White and his Ethiopian colleagues found the hominid fossils, it was Clark who unearthed their stone implements, opening fresh insights into the development of early pre-human cultures. 

Clark was born in London and educated as an archaeologist at Cambridge University. He became curator of the David Livingstone Memorial Museum in 1938 in Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia. He intended it to be temporary but stayed for 24 years. 

He went to Berkeley in 1961, served as chairman of the anthropology department for many years, and for 20 years he and White led expeditions to the prehistoric sites of the Middle Awash Valley that have produced major hominid finds as old as 6 million years. 

Clark is survived by his wife of 64 years, Betty Baume Clark; a daughter, Elizabeth Winterbottom of New South Wales, Australia; a son, John Clark of Kent, England; a sister, Moira Coulson of England; and five grandchildren.