Word: primatologist
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
That is the way Russell Mittermeier would like to keep this forest, and all the other forested areas of the world. The president of Conservation International, who is also a first-rate primatologist (A.B. Dartmouth, summa; Ph.D. Harvard), is part scientist, part activist, part barker and part kid. The kid, recently turned 49, is the same one who grew up in the Bronx and Brooklyn, N.Y., under the joint tutelage of a mother interested in the natural world, and Tarzan; Mittermeier continues to collect Tarzan novels and memorabilia. He and Peter A. Seligmann, CI's founder and chief executive, have...
Joining Heaney as winners this year are heart transplant pioneer Michael E. DeBakey, primatologist Jane Goodall, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Edward Albee and Netscape co-founder James H. Clark...
...primatologists the bonobo did not exist at all until 1928, when researchers first noticed that the chimpanzee-like animal they had long been calling a pygmy chimp was in fact an entirely separate species. In the decades that followed, the physical differences between the newly recognized bonobo and its larger cousin were thought to be all that distinguished them. Then, in the 1970s, Japanese primatologist Takayoshi Kano began observing bonobos in the wild and noticed a key difference: in the bonobo culture, unlike the chimp or human culture, males were not the dominant gender...
...answer may be politics, which is hardly confined to human society. Scottish psychologists Richard Byrne and Andrew Whiten believe chimps are positively "Machiavellian" in their efforts to acquire power within a group. In the Mahale Mountains in Tanzania, for instance, Japanese primatologist Toshisada Nishida observed one male chimp shift his support between two more dominant males who needed his allegiance to maintain power. The bigger males curried favor with this artful manipulator by allowing him access to fertile females. When a ruler began to take him for granted, the canny old chimp would shift allegiance to the pretender, thus ensuring...
...long after my talk with Fay, I encountered Japanese primatologist Masazumi Mitani, who along with Suehisa Kuroda established the first research camps at the edge of the Ndoki region in 1987. Since then, the Japanese researchers, in cooperation with Congolese scientist Antoine Ruffin Oko, have conducted a groundbreaking survey of animal populations in the Ndoki and have closely studied the primates, including gorillas and chimps. Mitani told me the animals were indeed unafraid of humans, but warned that conditions in the region were "very, very difficult." Knowing the extreme privation Japanese primatologists regularly endure, I took these cautionary words very...