Cynthia Moss

Updated on Oct 01, 2024

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Name Cynthia Moss Role Researcher		Education Smith College Awards MacArthur Fellowship

Books Elephant Memories, Echo of the elephants, Portraits in the wild, Little Big Ears Nominations National Book Award for Science (Paperback)

Oakland zoo celebrating elephants with cynthia moss

Cynthia Moss (born 1940 in Ossining, New York) is an American conservationist, wildlife researcher and writer, who specializes in African elephant family structure, life cycle, and behavior. She is director of the Amboseli Elephant Research Project in Kenya, where she has studied the same population of elephants for over 40 years, and is Program Director and Trustee for the Amboseli Trust for Elephants (ATE).

Cynthia moss on elephant mothers

Life and work

Moss graduated at Smith College in Massachusetts in 1962, majoring in philosophy. She worked as a reporter for Newsweek, specializing in theater and dramatic arts.

While visiting Lake Manyara National Park in Tanzania 1967, she met leading elephant researcher Dr. Iain Douglas-Hamilton. The following year she quit her job at Newsweek and moved to Africa to become a research assistant for Douglas-Hamilton. In 1972 she started the Amboseli Elephant Research Project at Amboseli National Park in Kenya.

Moss is most famous for her study of Echo, an elephant matriarch who has been the subject of several books and documentaries.

Awards

2001 MacArthur Fellows Program

Works

Publications

Moss, Cynthia J.; Croze, Harvey; Lee, Phyllis C., eds. (2011). The Amboseli Elephants: A Long-Term Perspective on a Long-Lived Mammal. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 9780226542232.

Moss, Cynthia (2000). Elephant Memories: Thirteen Years in the Life of an Elephant Family: with a new afterword (Univ. of Chicago Press ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-54237-9.

Pringle, Laurence (1997). Elephant Woman: Cynthia Moss Explores the World of Elephants. Photographs by Cynthia Moss (1st ed.). New York: Atheneum Books. ISBN 978-0-689-80142-6.

Moss, Cynthia (1997). Little Big Ears: The Story of Ely. Photographs by Martyn Colbeck. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 9780689800313.

Moss, Cynthia (1994) [1992]. Echo of the Elephants: The Story of an Elephant Family. Photographs by Martyn Colbeck. Quill. ISBN 0688135137.

Moss, Cynthia (1976). Portraits in the Wild: Animal Behavior in East Africa (2. impression. ed.). London: Hamilton. ISBN 978-0-241-02453-9.

Featured in documentaries by PBS Thirteen/WNET, HBO and BBC-TV

An Apology to Elephants (2013) – HBO

Echo: An Elephant to Remember (2010) – PBS, Nature

Echo and Other Elephants (2008) – BBC, David Attenborough

Echo of the Elephants (2005) – PBS, Nature

References

Cynthia Moss Wikipedia

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