Richard Kenneth Dell QSO (11 July 1920 – 6 March 2002) was a New Zealand malacologist.

Dell was born in Auckland in 1920. As a young boy, he took an interest in shells, collecting them from the shores of Waitematā Harbour. He even managed to start a "museum" in his backyard. He also helped curate the Auckland War Memorial Museum shell collection.

Dell studied at Mount Albert Grammar School and later at the Auckland University College. He took a teacher’s course at Auckland Teachers' College, but World War II delayed his plans to become a teacher. He joined the New Zealand Artillery, serving on Nissan Island, the Solomon Islands, Southwest Asia, Egypt, and Italy. He later published several papers on the land snails he had collected in the Solomon Islands.

In 1946, he married botanist and schoolteacher Miriam Matthews, and they had four daughters together. His wife continued working after their marriage and became a well-known women's advocate.

After the war, Dell was offered a job as malacologist at the Dominion Museum, where he started to standardise the cabinets and built up a collection of more than 30,000 specimens. In the meantime, he took a master's degree in Science at Victoria University College, with a pioneering thesis on cephalopods, octopuses and squid. Dell was one of the zoologists studying invertebrates on the 1949 New Zealand American Fiordland Expedition.

His breakthrough came with the 1954 Chatham Islands expedition. The results were published in 1956 as The Archibenthal Mollusca of New Zealand, which was a major contribution to the knowledge of molluscan fauna in the bathyal zone of New Zealand waters. This publication earned him a Doctorate in Science in 1956.

Soon after, Dell started to work on Antarctic collections, with among others Alan Beu and Winston Ponder. In 1964, he published a major monograph on the Antarctic bivalves, chitons and scaphopods.

In 1965 Dell was a participant in the Royal Society Expedition to the British Solomon Islands Protectorate.