DESMOND MORRIS LIVED IN MALTA

Desmond Morris, the zoologist who has died aged 98, was a writer on human and animal behaviour who achieved world renown with his book The Naked Ape (1967); he approached humans as just another species, sharing primate lineage, behaviour, rituals and family groupings with 192 other apes and monkeys; in later life he achieved acclaim as a painter.

The Naked Ape, in which he expounded the theory that a mere 10,000 years of so-called civilisation could not offset millions of years of hunter-gathering activity, sold some 20 million copies worldwide, and its defiant advocacy of Darwinism earned Morris the wrath of many religious believers, incensed by his claim to have explained faith in biological terms, his characterisation of man as a “risen ape” and not a “fallen angel”, and his declaration that “the whole of religion is a confidence trick”.

Undeterred, Morris went on to write more than 50 books, with titles such as Manwatching: a Field Guide to Human Behavio​ur, The Human Zoo, The Human Animal: a Personal View of the Human Species, Bodywatching: a Field Guide to the Human Species, The Naked Woman and The Naked Man – and even Catwatching, Dogwatching and Babywatching.

In many of these he repeated the formula he had employed with such success in The Naked Ape – describing human anatomical features and their equivalent in man’s primate cousins and ascribing any difference either to some evolutionary ploy that helped our ancestors to make the transition from hanging around in trees to walking upright, or to some sexual purpose, the better to trap a mate and produce a lot of offspring.

He would then embellish the narrative with fascinating but out-of-the way facts such as that medieval German women would expose their buttocks to a storm to drive away the Devil; that Roman prostitutes were legally required to wear blonde wigs; or that in 18th-century England there was a fashion for shaving off eyebrows and replacing them with fake ones made from mouse skin.

Morris can be said to have popularised the observation of body language, spawning battalions of armchair psychologists, but even the more scientifically minded sometimes found his efforts to squeeze all human behaviour into the evolutionary strait-jacket far-fetched.

Reviewing his The Naked Woman in The Daily Telegraph, Dr James Le Fanu noted that Morris immediately ran into difficulty with “The Hair”, which would reach down to the knees if left to grow as nature intended and presumably would have been quite an encumbrance to early Homo sapiens.

The “most likely explanation”, Morris averred, was that it would more readily permit human beings to recognise each other out on the savannah. “He is,” Le Fanu observed, “slightly embarrassed at this opening demonstration of the weakness of the evolutionary argument.”

Le Fanu also found Morris’s explanation for women’s prominent breasts (flat, dreary things in their primate cousins) equally unconvincing: they were, Morris claimed, “a pair of mini-buttocks on the chest that enable the woman to transmit those primeval sexual signals without turning her back on her companion.”

“The predictability – and crudeness – of Morris’s explanation,” suggested Le Fanu, “is a decoy to distract attention from his failure to engage with the profound issues as to why the human sexual experience should be so utterly and uniquely different from the baboon’s eight-second poke.”

Morris himself had to concede that the siting of a man’s testicles was possibly a piece of “evolutionary carelessness”.

Morris called himself a zoologist in his passport and a writer in Who’s Who, but he had a talent for seizing new ventures and turning them into professional sidelines. In addition to his popular works, he wrote many scientific papers, and books on art and archaeology. Though no sportsman himself, he was drawn to the world of football by its essentially tribal nature, and this led to a role as a director of Oxford United and to a book, The Soccer Tribe (1981).

Morris had taken up his anthropological studies after trying his hand as a painter, with a line in surrealistic works populated by phantasmagoric organic shapes, or “biomorphs”. When he first exhibited some of his works in the 1940s, he recalled, “Britain was still bleeding from the war. People didn’t want dark, disturbing imagery, they wanted the simplest kind of comfort art – landscapes and still life.”

His first exhibition, held in Swindon in 1948, prompted one angry visitor to demand that the paintings be “destroyed in a furnace”. In London the following year, Morris was given a show at ELT Mesens’s gallery but sold only two works for paltry sums. “Everybody hated the pictures and nobody bought any,” he recalled.

For many years art was an essentially private passion. In the 1970s, however, work that he had given to friends started coming up for sale at Sotheby’s. Galleries became interested and he began exhibiting again, this time more successfully. In 2018 an exhibition of more than 100 of his works on paper, for which David Attenborough and Will Self wrote catalogue essays, opened at Redfern Gallery in Mayfair. The same year a painting by Morris was reported to have been sold privately for £850,000.

Desmond John Morris was born on January 24 1928 at Purton in Wiltshire, the only son of Captain Harry Morris and Marjorie, née Hunt. When he was 14 his father, who had been badly injured in the trenches and was trying to make ends meet as a not very successful boys’ adventure story writer, died from his injuries, creating in the son a lasting hatred of the politicians who had sent his father to war and the churchmen who had condoned it.

His Wiltshire childhood was strongly influenced by his grandfather, a naturalist and newspaper proprietor, but more particularly by his mother, who “never, ever said ‘don’t do that’ about anything” – even when he had 200 toads among his menagerie of snakes, lizards, mice, birds, foxes and fish. A shy, solitary child, Desmond would spend hours watching fish, amphibians and waterfowl on his grandmother’s pond from a home-made raft of oil drums and planks.

His first brush with zoology came with a discovery in an old trunk in the attic of Nehemiah Grew’s Comparative Anatomy of Stomachs and Guts, which fascinated the young boy with its Gothic illustrations, his favourite being the “Crop, Gizard and Guts of a Dunghil Cock”.

Morris was educated at Dauntsey’s School in the county; there, inspired by a book of Goya etchings in the school library, he began painting, encouraged in his surrealist endeavours by official disapproval. After a brief flirtation with medicine he was called up in 1946 and found himself teaching art at an Army demobilisation camp near Swindon, where, stung by the reaction to his first exhibition, he retreated to the safer world of animals.

After taking a First in zoology at Birmingham University, Morris studied with Niko Tinbergen at Magdalen College, Oxford, writing his doctoral thesis on the reproductive behaviour of the 10-spined stickleback.

He went on to publish a much-cited paper on snail-eating thrushes, showing that the “anvil” stones on which the birds crack the shells of their prey are not selected by tradition or habit, but for their geographical proximity to where the snails were first caught.

He also showed that the hammering action involved the thrush holding its prey by the shell lip or the flesh, and that successful breakage was followed by a bill-wiping phase to clean away the slime and shell fragments. His other revelation, which contradicted earlier ornithologists, was that blackbirds lacked the necessary co-ordination and “nervous equipment” to master this snail-breaking technique, although they had found a way to enjoy the taste of freshly cracked mollusc, by stealing them off their smarter but smaller song thrush relative.

In 1956 Morris was appointed head of the Granada Television and Film Unit at the Zoological Society of London, and the following year he combined his interests in art and animals by curating an exhibition of paintings by chimpanzees at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA).

The show was widely derided in the press, but the work was admired by Miró, Dalí, and Picasso, who was even presented with a painting. When asked by a reporter what he thought of the work, Picasso’s reply was to bite him. Morris’s first book, The Biology of Art (1963), was a serious study of chimpanzee art and what it can tell us about aesthetic control in apes.

In 1959, aged 31, Morris became London Zoo’s youngest ever curator of mammals. Before The Naked Ape, however, he was best known as the presenter of ITV’s Zoo Time, which ran weekly from 1956 until 1967.

One of his painting chimps, Congo, became a television star on the series until the animal severely injured Morris’s secretary. Congo was sent back to the zoo but did not thrive. As Morris reflected: “Because of my passion to find out about the origins of art, I had created a humanised ape who hated other apes. He wanted to be with humans. I felt awful about it, and I could hardly bear to see him in a zoo cage.” Congo died of TB not long after.

A move back into art as director of the ICA in 1967 proved frustrating, for Morris felt his own painting talents were stifled by it. After screening Yoko Ono’s film of 365 sets of buttocks, he resigned, rescued by the unexpected success of The Naked Ape, written in a month, which became an overnight bestseller.

Freed from financial constraints for the first time, he moved to a 30-room mansion in Malta where he kept two Rolls-Royces and a yacht and reportedly blew all the proceeds of The Naked Ape. After five years he returned to Oxford and Tinbergen as a research fellow at Wolfson College (1973-81).

He continued to publish at an astonishing rate, ranging from the art of ancient Cyprus and the lives of the Surrealists to a dictionary of dog breeds. He continued to make television documentaries on human and animal behaviours throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

In 2006 he published an autobiography, Watching: Encounters with Humans and Other Animals, its index featuring, alongside pandas and bird-eating spiders, such figures as Ursula Andress, Brigitte Bardot, Marlon Brando, Donna the drug-sniffing dog and Morris’s first girlfriend, Diana Dors. “The fact that he turns out to be a self-aggrandising name-dropper,” sniffed one Telegraph reviewer, “rather proves his point – we are hierarchical beasts after all, programmed to posture and please.”

​Desmond Morris married, in 1952, Ramona Baulch, who died in 2018. He is survived by their son Jason.

Desmond Morris, born January 24 1928, died April 19 2026