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Desmond Morris, the British zoologist, writer and surrealist painter whose bestselling book The Naked Ape put humans firmly back in their place among animals, has died, the BBC reported on Monday, citing his son Jason.

Art and nature dominated his long career in equal measure, but it was that 1967 book, its sequels and his regular TV appearances that secured his reputation.

Subtitled A zoologist’s study of the human animal, the blurb in the first edition said it would show how our sex and social lives, gestures, emotions and habits all followed patterns “set down by … hunting-ape ancestors”.

Sales were boosted by the frisson of the title, the use of a nude man and woman in adverts, and a serialisation in the Sunday Mirror newspaper, which promised “one of the most controversial books written in our time”.

Some church and other public figures bolstered the publicity by expressing outrage over the book’s frank focus on mankind’s evolutionary makeup. As Morris pursued his career as a writer and scientific populariser, he also built up a reputation in the more rarefied world of British surrealism.

“I have always been two people,” Morris told artist and writer Melanie Coles in an interview for the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 2016. “I am an objective scientist and then I go into my studio and my other hemisphere of my brain starts to work. I become an artist and am irrational in my surrealist work.”

Desmond Morris was born in the rural southwest English county of Wiltshire on January 24, 1928, the great-grandson of Victorian naturalist and newspaper owner William Morris.

At school through the 1940s, he developed his parallel fascinations in the natural world and new art movements.

Originally published in Dawn, April 21st, 2026

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