Arthur Humphreys Foord was born on September 14, 1844, in Brixton, Surrey, England.

He was a British paleontologist and scientific illustrator. He attended Chatham House School, Ramsgate, Kent. He worked in a commercial business from 1861 to 1871 and built a reputation as a natural history illustrator. He travelled to Montreal in 1871, with letters of introduction to the first director of the Geological Survey of Canada, Sir William Edmond Logan, Alfred Richard Cecil Selwyn, and to John William Dawson. In 1872, the Geological Survey of Canada appointed Foord as a natural history artist, a position he held until 1883. Though he worked primarily as an artist, he also gained experience in the field collecting and museum curation. From 1875 to 1876 he took courses in zoology and paleontology at McGill University under Dawson. In 1883, he was appointed assistant paleontologist when the Survey moved to Ottawa. He resigned the same year and returned to London where he worked as a volunteer at the British Museum (Natural History) and took up the private study of geology, practical zoology, and comparative anatomy. In 1883, he published "Contribution to the Micro-Palaeontology of the Cambro-Silurian Rocks of Canada", followed by 5 papers on fossil corals in the Annals and Magazine of Natural History and Geological Magazine (1884-1886). Foord was given the responsibility of preparing the “Catalogue of the Fossil Cephalopoda” in the British Museum, seeing the first 2 volumes published in 1888 and 1891, and a third with George Charles Crick published in 1897. In 1888, he was made a fellow of the Geological Society of London. He moved to Dublin in 1891 where he was appointed librarian and editor of scientific publications of the Royal Dublin Society, a position he held until his retirement in 1920. He worked on the cephalopod material in the Geological Survey of Ireland collections and the National Museum of Ireland. In 1896, he was awarded a doctorate from the University of Munich having submitted a thesis which he later published as a 5-volume monograph with the Palaeontographical Society, “Carboniferous Cephalopoda of Ireland" (1897–1903).

In 1896, he married Ida Franziska Adelheid Kuhlmeyer (1846–1916). He died on August 12, 1933, in Steyning, Sussex, England.