Prudence Hero Napier (née Rutherford) (1916 – 6, June 1997) was one of Britain's most eminent primatologists, and the world's leading expert on the taxonomy of

primates Primates are a diverse order of mammals. They are divided into the strepsirrhines, which include the lemurs, galagos, and lorisids, and the haplorhines, which include the tarsiers and the simians ( monkeys and apes, the latter including ...

. She was the widow of the primatologist,

John Napier John Napier of Merchiston (; 1 February 1550 – 4 April 1617), nicknamed Marvellous Merchiston, was a Scottish landowner known as a mathematician, physicist, and astronomer. He was the 8th Laird of Merchiston. His Latinized name was Ioan ...

.''International Journal of Primatology'', Vol. 19, Number 2/ April, 1998. pp. 203-05

Biography

Prudence was born in Liverpool in 1916, the daughter of Sir Hugo Rutherford. In 1936 she married John Napier, a surgeon who was developing a particular interest in the hand. During the 1950s he became convinced that human functional anatomy could not be properly understood without a knowledge of non-human primates and, with Prudence's help, founded the Unit of Primatology in the

Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine UCL Medical School is the medical school of University College London (UCL) and is located in London, United Kingdom. The School provides a wide range of undergraduate and postgraduate medical education programmes and also has a medical educa ...

, which was the first centre in Great Britain devoted to the study of non-human primates. Prudence joined her husband in his work and increasingly set out on her own. She contributed to ''A Handbook of Living Primates'' (New York: Academic Press, 1967, with John Russell Napier), the first book of its kind. She was the foremost contributor to children's books on non-human primates during the 1960s and 1970s.

Selected bibliography

* 1967: ''A Handbook of Living Primates'' (New York: Academic Press, with John Russell Napier) * 1970: ''Old World Monkeys: Evolution, Systematics, and Behavior'' (New York: Academic Press, with John Russell Napier) * 1974: ''Chimpanzees'' (London: Bodley Head) * 1977: ''Lemurs, Lorises, and Bushbabies'' (London: Bodley Head, with Colin Threadgall) * 1988: ''The Natural History of the Primates'' (Cambridge: MIT Press, with John Russell Napier)

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Napier, Prudence Hero 1916 births 1997 deaths Women primatologists Primatologists British paleoanthropologists 20th-century British zoologists Scientists from Liverpool 20th-century British women scientists British women anthropologists Daughters of baronets