People

Three generations of scientists, many of whom now lead research and conservation across China, India, Pakistan, Mongolia, Iran and Brazil, got their first field experience alongside Schaller.

It’s hard to find a wildlife biologist anywhere in the world untouched by the “most brilliant field zoologist” of the century, as Schaller has been called by admirers from Desmond Morris to David Attenborough. It was Schaller who guided Jane Goodall in the first months of her chimp study, and his work that Dian Fossey took up a decade later. Robert Sapolsky became a primatologist after reading Year of the Gorilla; EO Wilson drew heavily on Schaller’s mountain gorilla and lion studies in Sociobiology; Attenborough himself did his best to emulate “the great explorer zoologist star.”

Two decades before Michael Soulé and others established Conservation Biology as a distinct field, Schaller had laid the ground with his early warnings on the dire state of wild species and his insistence on studying whole ecosystems to answer the crucial question—what does this animal need? And while it is now mainstream for zoologists, ecologists and naturalists to study the minds and social lives of elephants, octopus, owls, hawks, crows and wolves, all build on the insights Schaller pioneered into animal consciousness and culture.

Of still more-enduring value was his commitment, emergent over his lifetime, to see conservation led by the people who live alongside these animals. Three generations of scientists in China, India, Pakistan, Mongolia, Iran and Brazil got their first field experience with Schaller and now lead research and conservation in their home countries. Zalmai Moheb, who having grown up in a refugee camp in Pakistan wondered why they weren’t just eating the wildlife, wound up with George’s help earning Afghanistan’s first zoology PhD. Tshiring Lamu Lama herded her family’s yaks in their tiny Himalayan village and is now one of Nepal’s leading snow leopard conservationists.

His influence reverberated far beyond science, marking some of the most important cultural artifacts of the past half century. Schaller is the “GS” who led Peter Matthiessen in search of the snow leopard. Director Stanley Kubrick based the Dawn of Man sequence that opens 2001: A Space Odyssey on his gorilla work, and Michael Crichton wrote him into the sequel to Jurassic Park, proving everything the experts wrote “exaggerated, misunderstood or fantasy.”