Richard Conniff is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times and a popular author specializing in human and animal behaviors. He has collected tarantulas in the Peruvian Amazon, tracked leopards with !Kung San hunters in the Namibian desert, climbed the Mountains of the Moon in western Uganda--and also explored the strange world of the modern workplace.
His latest book is House of Lost Worlds: Dinosaurs, Dynasties, and The Story of Life on Earth, (Yale 2016). He is a National Magazine Award-winning writer for Smithsonian, The Atlantic, National Geographic, and other publications, a 2007 Guggenheim Fellow, and a 2009 winner of the Gerald Loeb Award for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism. His other books include The Species Seekers: Heroes, Fools, and the Mad Pursuit of Life on Earth (Norton 2010), Swimming with Piranhas at Feeding Time: My Life Doing Dumb Stuff with Animals (Norton 2009), The Ape in the Corner Office (Crown 2006), The Natural History of the Rich (Norton 2002), and Spineless Wonders: Strange Tales of the Invertebrate World (Holt, 1996). He has been a frequent commentator on NPR’s Marketplace, and has written and presented television shows for the National Geographic Channel, TBS, and the BBC, among others.