ABOVE: COURTESY OF THE SEYFARTH-CHENEY FAMILY
Dorothy Cheney, whose research in Africa unlocked the complex communication and sophisticated social comprehension of nonhuman primates, died November 9 of breast cancer. She was 68.
The University of Pennsylvania professor was known for introducing strict experimental standards to studies of animals in the wild. “They really pushed the limit [of scientific rigor] and established that as the new standard for doing field biology,” says Marc Schmidt, a biology professor at Penn, speaking of Cheney and Robert Seyfarth, her husband and research partner. What was once a discipline focused on observation became one of experimentation—using playbacks of recorded alarm calls and other innovative techniques.
Cheney was born in Boston in 1950 and earned her bachelor’s degree from Wellesley College in 1972. Rather than go to law school as planned, she joined her husband on a trip to study baboons in South Africa, The New ...
