Alison Jolly

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Alison Jolly (born 1937) is a primatologist. She has written several books for both popular and scientific audiences and conducted extensive fieldwork on Lemurs in Madagascar, primarily at the Berenty Reserve, a small private reserve of gallery forest set in the semi-arid spiny desert zone of the far south of Madagascar.

Jolly began studying lemur behaviour at Berenty in 1963. Since 1990 she has returned for every birthing season to carry out research assisted by student volunteers. She has focused on ring-tailed lemur demography, ranging, and especially intertroop and territorial behaviour, in the context of the five-fold difference in population density from front to back of the reserve.

Jolly is a Visiting Scientist at the Univiersity of Sussex in the UK.

Her publications include Lords & Lemurs: Mad Scientists, Kings With Spears, and the Survival of Diversity in Madagascar, A World Like Our Own: Man and Nature in Madagascar, Lemur Behavior: A Madagascar Field Study and Lucy’s Legacy: Sex and Intelligence in Human Evolution. As well as being co-author of Madagascar: A World out of Time she has also written numerous articles both for consumer magazines and for scientific journals.

In June 2006, a new species of mouse lemur - Microcebus jollyae - was named in her honor.