Talk on the Discovery of the Gorilla Featured as Part of Darwin Bicentennial Celebration

Published: February 6, 2009

This image from the Academy of Natural Sciences depicts Paul Du Chaillu confronting a gorilla in West Africa.

New Haven, Conn. — On Thursday, Feb. 12, Robert McCrac­ken Peck, senior fellow of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, will speak on campus on the bicentennial of Charles Darwin's birth.

Peck's talk, titled "The ‘Discovery' of the Gorilla and How It Shook the World," will begin at 5:30 p.m. in the third floor auditorium of the Peabody Museum, 170 Whitney Ave. At 4:45 p.m., the Peabody will hold a Darwin birthday celebration, featuring cake and a reading of Darwin's letter to Othniel C. Marsh. The entire program is free and open to the public and there will be cake for everyone who attends. The talk is part of the 2008-2009 John H. Ostrom Program Series on "Nature's Narrators."

In his fully illustrated lecture, Peck relates the story of explorer Paul Du Chaillu's "discovery" of gorillas in the jungles of Gabon, West Africa, and traces its social impact from the 19th century to the present day.

A writer, naturalist and historian, Peck has traveled extensively on behalf of the Academy of Natural Sciences to North and South America, Africa, Asia and Europe. He is the author of "A Celebration of Birds: The Life and Art of Louis Agassiz Fuertes," "Headhunters and Hummingbirds: An Expedition into Ecuador" and "William Bartram's Travels." His photographs have been published in books, journals and magazines and exhibited in museums across the United States.

In 1990 he authored "Land of the Eagle: A Natural History of North America," the companion volume to an eight-part BBC/PBS television series of the same title which examined the discovery and exploration of America from a natural history point of view.

Peck's most recent project has been an exhibition and book about the British artist and naturalist Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins (1807-1894), Darwin's illustrator and the first person to create life-sized sculptures of dinosaurs (at the Crystal Palace in London in 1854).

For more "Yale Celebrates Darwin" events, please visit http://opa.yale.edu/sp/darwin.

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