Martin Moynihan

Martin Humphrey Moynihan (5 February 1928 - 3 December 1996) was an influential behavioral evolutionary biologist and ornithologist who studied under Ernst Mayr and Niko Tinbergen, and was a contemporary of Desmond Morris and various other famous ethologists. He was the founding director of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) in Panama.^[1]

His early research was mainly on seagulls as they were ubiquitous and easy to observe. Later work included even the octopus, and Terence McKenna quotes Moynihan in his book "Food of the Gods" as saying, with respect to this creature's remarkable ability to change its body's shape, texture and color, "Like the octopi, our destiny is to become what we think, to have our thoughts become our bodies and our bodies become our thoughts."^{[citation needed]}

He was married to Olga F. Linares, the noted Panamanian-American anthropologist and STRI senior research scientist.

Moynihan died in Albi, France in 1996 of lung cancer, aged 68.^[2]

Notes

1. ^ Princeton University 1997; Smith 1998: 755.
2. ^ Smith 1998: 755

References

Leigh, Egbert Giles (1999). Tropical Forest Ecology : A View from Barro Colorado Island. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-509602-9. OCLC 36768102. 

Princeton University (2 April 1997). "[Memorial:] Martin Humphrey Moynihan '48" (online republication). Princeton Alumni Weekly (Princeton NJ: Trustees for Princeton University) 97 (13): np. ISSN 0149-9270. OCLC 2436114. http://paw.princeton.edu/memorials/51/59/index.xml. Retrieved 2009-10-09. 

Royte, Elizabeth (2001). The Tapir's Morning Bath: Mysteries of the Tropical Rain Forest and the Scientists Who are Trying to Solve Them (1st Mariner Books ed.). Boston: Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 0-395-97997-8. OCLC 46884151. 

Smith, Neal Griffith (July 1998). "In Memoriam: Martin Humphrey Moynihan, 1926-1996" (PDF online facsimile). The Auk (Washington DC: American Ornithologists' Union) 115 (3): 755–758. ISSN 0004-8038. OCLC 89673496. http://elibrary.unm.edu/sora/Auk/v115n03/p0755-p0758.pdf. 

External links

• Works by or about Martin Moynihan in libraries (WorldCat catalog)

Persondata
Name	Moynihan, Martin H.
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	5 February 1928
Place of birth
Date of death	3 December 1996
Place of death