Desmond Morris
Desmond John Morris ( born January 24, 1928 in Purton in Swindon, Wiltshire, England ) is a British zoologist, ethologist, writer and artist.
International famous Morris was The Naked Ape by his bestseller. There followed various books on body language of humans and animals, including "Body Watching / body signals ", " baby watching ", " Catwatching ", " Dogwatching " and " Horse Watching", which are also present in German.
Life
After finishing his education and his military service (1946-1948) Desmond Morris studied at the University of Birmingham until 1951 Zoology. During his military service, he gave lectures in Fine Art at Chisledon Army College and began to paint professionally.
Immediately before beginning his studies at the age of 20 years, Morris had his first exhibition of paintings at the Swindon Arts Centre. In 1950 he was able to present his paintings together with Joan Miró in the context of a show of surrealist works at the London Gallery. Likewise, in 1950 he wrote and produced two surrealist films: Time Flower and The Butterfly and the Pin. This was followed by exhibitions in Belgium and Oxford. In 1957, he combined his artistic interests until then a unique way with the biology of behavior problems by letting paint canvases chimpanzees, her paintings and drawings exhibited at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts, and so was able to draw comparisons between apes and human children.
From the autumn of 1951 Desmond Morris had enrolled at the University of Oxford for zoology and did research there for his doctorate degree (obtained in 1954 ) among the later Nobel laureate Nikolaas Tinbergen on aspects of communication in the reproductive behavior of sticklebacks. Morris published in the 1950s and 1960s, nearly 50 articles in professional journals, his first appeared in 1952 in Behaviour.
1956 Morris went to London, where he became head of a working for the Zoological Society of London film and TV crews from Granada Television. For ITV, he developed the verhaltenskundliche television series for BBC2 Zootime and 100 episodes of Life in the Animal World. In 1958 he published his first children's book about a chimpanzee London Zoo: The Story of Congo, who was often in his television programs as a guest, and was made famous by Abstract painting. 1959 Morris moved to the London Zoo, where he worked as a curator for mammals until 1967. In 1967 the book that made him world- famous: The Naked Ape: A Zoologist 's Study of the Human Animal ( German: The Naked Ape ).
1973 Desmond Morris returned to the University of Oxford and researched some time in the group of Nikolaas Tinbergen, who was honored in December of the same year with the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, on the innate basis of people's behavior.
In the following years, Desmond Morris made several world tours, wrote a number of popular science, verhaltenskundlichen books, produced instructional films and TV films, painted and exhibited his paintings in numerous exhibitions.
Desmond Morris is married to Ramona Baulch since 1952, has a son and four grandchildren.