Jonathan Kingdon

Jonathan Stephen Kingdon (* 1935 in Tabora , Tanganyika (now Tanzania )) is a British zoologist, scientific author and artist. His research focus is the African mammal fauna, about which he has written several books.

Life

Kingdon graduated from the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford from 1952 to 1956 . From 1956 to 1959 he studied at the Royal College of Art in London. From 1958 to 1960 he taught at Working Men's College in London. In 1958 he founded the Young Commonwealth Artists Group, an artist collective in London, together with Frank Bowling , Neil Stocker and Billy Apple . From 1960 to 1974 he was an art teacher at the Makerere School of Fine Arts in Kampala, Uganda. For his lifelike drawings, Kingdon often traveled to the African bush to illustrate the animals on site. Art exhibitions of Kingdon's work have been held in Islington , England (1958), the Uganda Museum in Kampala (1963), the Sorsbie Gallery in Nairobi (1963), the Nommo Gallery in Kampala (1966) and the Watatu Gallery in Nairobi (1970) organized. His pictures were also shown in the St. Francis Chapel of Makerere University , Kampala, Uganda, in the Rondo Seminary Chapel in Masasi , Tanzania, in the Parliament of Nairobi, in the Chidya Secondary School in Masasi, in the Alliance High School, Kikuyu , Kenya, in the Agricultural Development Corporation in Nairobi and in the Bukoba Cathedral in Tanzania. In 1971 the first volume of Kingdon's book series East African Mammals: An Atlas of Evolution in Africa was published , which ended in 1988 with the seventh volume. In 2013, after 15 years of preparation, he published in collaboration with more than 350 other authors, including David Happold , Meredith Happold , Thomas M. Butynski , Louise H. Emmons , Richard W. Thorington , Derek William Yalden , Rainer Hutterer , Colin Groves , Peter Grubb , Peter Vogel , Manuel Ruedi , Ara Monadjem , Fenton Peter David Cotterill , Alicia V. Linzey , Julian Kerbis Peterhans and Fritz Dieterlen created the six-volume work Mammals of Africa , in which 1160 species of mammals on the African continent are described in detail. In addition to his zoological books, Kingdon deals with human evolution. In 1993 his book Self-Made Man: Human Evolution From Eden to Extinction was published , which has been available in a German translation since 1994 ( And the man created himself, The risk of human evolution ). Kingdon has received numerous awards for his work, including the Stamford Raffles Award from the Zoological Society of London in 1978 , the Silver Medal from the Zoological Society of London in 1993, the Cherry Kearton Medal and Award from the Royal Geographical Society in 1998, and in 2014 for his work Mammals of Africa with the American Library Association's Dartmouth Medal .

From 1995 to 2002 Kingdon was head of Fauna and Flora International .

Works (selection)

• Kilimanjaro: Animals in a landscape . 1983. ISBN 0-563-20230-0 .
• African mammal drawings: The Wellcome volume . 1983. ISBN 0-9508837-2-7 .
• East African Mammals: An Atlas of Evolution in Africa . A seven volume series. 1988. ISBN 0-226-43724-8 .
• Island Africa: The Evolution of Africa's Rare Animals and Plants . 1990. ISBN 0-691-08560-9 .
• Self-Made Man: Human Evolution From Eden to Extinction . 1993. ISBN 0-471-15960-3 . (German: And man created himself, The risk of human evolution in Birkhäuser Verlag , 1994)
• The Kingdon Field Guide to African Mammals . 2003. ISBN 0-7136-6513-0 . (2nd edition 2015)
• Lowly Origin: Where, When and Why our Ancestors First Stood Up . Princeton University Press Princeton. 2003. ISBN 978-0691050867
• The Kingdon Pocket Guide to African Mammals . Princeton University Press. 2004. ISBN 9780691122397 .
• Guide des mammiferes d'Afrique . Paris: Delachaux & Niestle. 2006. ISBN 978-2603017456 .
• Mammals of Africa . 2013. ISBN 9781408122570 .

literature

• Camden Arts Center Exhibition: Contemporary African Art . Holmes & Meier Publishers, Incorporated, 1970, p. 35
• Judith von D. Miller: Art in East Africa: A guide to contemporary art , 1975, p. 90

Web links

• Artist profile of the Gallery Pangolin
• University of Oxford Wildlife Conservation Research Unit staff profile
• Employee profile of the Department of Zoology at the University of Oxford
• Jonathan Kingdon in the Internet Movie Database (English)