Peter Grubb (zoologist)

Peter Grubb ( b. 1942 in Ealing, London Borough of Ealing; † 23 December 2006, London ) was an English zoologist. His research focus was the systematics and distribution of African mammals.

Life and work

Grubbs father William Grubb worked as a research chemist in the company Imperial Chemical Industries and later as an academic teacher in Scotland. His mother Anne Sirutis was a school teacher from Lithuania. His younger sister Katrina is an artist. After graduating as a Bachelor of Science in Zoology at University College London, he was a research assistant at the Wellcome Institute of Comparative Physiology of the Zoological Society of London. In the early 1960s he went for three years on the Scottish St. Kilda islands and studied the Soay sheep for his dissertation. For this work he was awarded the 1968 Thomas Henry Huxley Award of the Zoological Society of London. In the same year he participated in an expedition of the Royal Society in part on Aldabra Atoll, where he particularly studied the giant tortoises. In the following years he worked for twelve years as a lecturer at the University of Ghana.

1993 and 2005 he was involved in the reference Mammal Species of the World, where he wrote the chapter on the Artiodactyla and Perissodactyla. He also wrote articles for Mammalian Species, the Journal of the American Society of Mammalogists. He published checklists West African mammals, including Sierra Leone, Gambia and Ghana and wrote several revisions, including more than warthogs, giraffes, gazelles and buffalo. In 1993 he was co -author of the IUCN publication Pigs, peccaries, and hippos: Status Survey and Conservation Action plan. His research first descriptions include Cephalophus crusalbum, Felis margarita harrisoni, Muntiacus atherodes, Cephalophus hypoxanthus, Cephalophus curticeps, Cephalophus lestradei, musk cupreus, Cercopithecus erythrogaster pococki and Piliocolobus epieni.

In June 2006, Grubb was honored with the Stamford Raffles Award of the Zoological Society of London. After two surgeries in January and October 2005 to remove a tumor, he died in December 2006 from cancer. He was married and had a son and a daughter.