Art and nature dominated his long career in equal measure, but it was that 1967 book, its sequels and his regular television 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’’.
It was not revolutionary science, but it was well-marketed science and appeared on the shelves at exactly the right time.
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 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.
After two years national service in the British Army, during which he lectured on fine arts, he exhibited his art while simultaneously studying zoology at the University of Birmingham.
In 1951 he began a doctorate at the department of zoology, University of Oxford, in animal behaviour. While there Morris met his future wife, Ramona Baulch, and worked on the reproductive behaviour of the ten-spined stickleback fish, and then of birds.
Those interests came together after he moved to London, started making films and TV shows on animal behaviour, and worked on a 1957 exhibition of drawings and paintings by chimpanzees at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, where he was later director.
In the years that followed, he served as curator of mammals at London Zoo, published scientific papers, presented TV programmes, including Granada TV’s Zoo Time series, and wrote books for adults and children, many co-authored by Ramona.
Morris was London Zoo’s curator of mammals from 1959-67, during which time he encouraged one of the zoo’s chimpanzees, Congo, to paint.
The animal’s creations sparked huge debate as to whether they were art or not, but they sold well — buyers included Pablo Picasso, and Congo also exhibited at the ICA.
Zoo Time’s competition was Zoo Quest, a BBC show hosted by Sir David Attenborough. The men struck up an enduring friendship.
Morris hosted several other series and one-off specials, including The Animals Roadshow and Animal Country.
After the worldwide success of The Naked Ape — a fixture on many bookshelves through the 1970s and ’80s, which sold an estimated 18 million copies and was blacklisted by the Catholic Church — the couple moved to Malta where they had a son.
Ironically, the Maltese government had banned The Naked Ape from being sold on the island. The couple left Malta in 1973, Morris taking up a research position at Oxford.
The books kept flowing over the years — more than 50 — including The Human Zoo, a study of human behaviour in cities, Intimate Behaviour, Peoplewatching, The Naked Man and The Naked Woman.
Another Morris best-seller was 1981’s The Soccer Tribe, in which he turned his anthropological lens on to the world of football and football fandom. It was no passing fancy; three years earlier Morris had been elected vice-chairman of Oxford United football club.
In 2022, he published a study of the art movement he had helped form, The British Surrealists. Later that year London’s Redfern Gallery put on an exhibition of his own work, titled Desmond Morris: The Last Surrealist. It was the last of more than 50 shows of Morris’s work.
Desmond Morris died on April 19, aged 98. — Reuters/Allied Media
