Desmond Morris, The Naked Ape author with links to Malta, dies at 98

Desmond Morris, the legendary zoologist, author, artist and TV presenter, best known for his book The Naked Ape, has died at the age of 98.

Morris’s death was confirmed in a statement from his son Jason, who said that it followed “a lifetime of exploration, curiosity and creativity”.

“A zoologist, manwatcher, author and artist, he was still writing and painting right up until his death. He was a great man and an even better father and grandfather,” the statement said.

Morris was born on 24 January 1928 in Purton, near Swindon. He went on to serve two years of national service in the British army and become a lecturer in fine arts at the Army College, before studying zoology at Birmingham University. Throughout his course, he refused to do animal experiments, and instead simply studied their behaviour.

In 1956, he became Head of the Granada TV and Film Unit for the Zoological Society of London, and later became the zoo’s curator of mammals.

In 1967, his book The Naked Ape: A Zoologist’s Study of the Human Animal was published, looking at humans from a zoological perspective and framing our behaviour in evolutionary terms.

Over the years he wrote many more books and presented many TV programmes, while continuing to produce and exhibit artworks, and investigate animal behaviours. He experimented with a chimp named Congo by giving him a paintbrush, in order to prove that artistic expression could be found elsewhere in the animal kingdom.

His TV work included such series as Zoo Time, Life in the Animal World, The Animal Contract, The Human Animal and The Human Sexes.

In 2017, a BBC programme titled The Secret Surrealist showcased Morris and his artwork, examining his ‘double-life’ as a painter.

Morris died in Ireland, where he had lived since the death of his wife, Ramona, in 2018.

Desmond Morris’s Maltese Interlude

Desmond Morris’s time in Malta reflected a deliberate retreat from the pace of public life into a more reflective, observational phase of his career—one that, in hindsight, proved quietly productive.

Settling in the village of Lija, where he lived alongside fellow writer Anthony Burgess, Morris found a setting conducive to both family life and intellectual work. It was here that his son Jason was born, and where he shared a period of relative calm with his wife Ramona.

True to form, Morris did not merely reside in Malta—he studied it. His fascination with the island’s traditional fishing boats, the vividly painted luzzus, led to a detailed anthropological inquiry into their symbolism and craftsmanship. Though the research remained dormant for decades, it eventually surfaced in his later work, The Boats of Malta – The Art of the Fishermen, underscoring his enduring interest in the intersection of art, culture, and human behaviour.

Beyond material culture, Morris turned his attention to the subtleties of Maltese social interaction. He identified distinctive traits in local body language—most notably a form of “directional shrugging” and nuanced head movements—adding another layer to his broader exploration of non-verbal communication.

At the same time, he was struck by the theatricality of Maltese religious life, particularly the elaborate displays of Catholic pageantry. Yet this cultural richness coexisted with the constraints of the era: censorship laws meant that his own seminal work, The Naked Ape, was not legally accessible on the island, a contradiction not lost on Morris or his contemporaries.