Marc van Roosmalen
| Marc van Roosmalen | |
|---|---|
| Born |
June 23, 1947 Tilburg, Netherlands |
| Residence | Manaus, Brazil |
| Alma mater | University of Amsterdam |
| Occupation | Primatologist |
| Years active | 1976–present |
Dr. Marc van Roosmalen (born June 23, 1947) is a Dutch-born Brazilian primatologist. He was elected as one of the "Heroes of the Planet" by Time magazine in 2000. His research has led to the identification of several new monkey species, as well as other animals and plants, although some of these identifications are challenged as dubious, unconvincing, or contradictory to the evidence. He is also an activist in the protection of the Brazilian rainforest. Van Roosmalen was awarded the honour of officer in the Order of the Golden Ark by Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands in 1997.
Marc grew up in Tilburg, a city in the southern part of the Netherlands. His father was a chemist. He met and married his first wife while living in Utrecht, where he had moved for school at age 17. They had two sons. In early 2008, he divorced his first wife and married his Brazilian girlfriend.
Van Roosmalen studied biology at the University of Amsterdam and did four years of doctoral fieldwork beginning in 1976 studying the red-faced spider monkey in Suriname. He later did two more years of work in French Guiana, following which he published the book Fruits of the Guianan Flora. In 1986 he was hired by the INPA (Brazilian National Institute of Amazonian Research, where he initially thrived. During this period, he launched a non-governmental organization focused on creating wilderness preserves in the deep Amazon. He became a naturalized Brazilian citizen in 1997. Marc considers Alfred Russel Wallace a hero and is an advocate of Wallace's "river barrier" hypothesis that the major rivers of the Amazonian basin serve as barriers that create separate genetically distinct evolutionary regions.
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