Richard Marlin Perkins (March 28, 1905 – June 14, 1986) was an American zoologist. He was best known as a host of the television program Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom from 1963 to 1985. Life and career Perkins was born on March 28, 1905, in Carthage, Missouri, the youngest of three sons of Joseph Dudley Perkins and Mynta Mae (née Miller) Perkins. When he was seven years old, his mother nursed him through a serious bout of pneumonia and died of the illness herself. His grieving father sent Marlin's two older brothers to private school, and Marlin was sent to his Aunt Laura's farm in Pittsburg, Kansas. He attended public school there through eighth grade. In the fall of 1919, he entered Wentworth Military Academy. There, Perkins demonstrated his fascination with snakes by keeping blue racers in his room. One afternoon, while exercising them on a lawn at the back of the barracks, he was spotted by a faculty officer and got in trouble for handling them. Perkins briefly attended the University of Missouri, but quit school to become a laborer at the Saint Louis Zoological Park. He rose through the ranks, becoming the reptile curator in 1928. After being hired as a curator of the Buffalo Zoological Park in Buffalo, New York, Perkins was eventually promoted to director in 1938. He then served as director at the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago, Illinois, starting in 1944. In 1957, in a famous case, he sent a snake that was difficult to identify from the zoo to the herpetologist at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, Dr. Karl P. Schmidt. Schmidt carelessly allowed the snake to bite him not believing that it's venom would be enough to harm him. The snake was a very deadly boomslang and, interestingly, Schmidt maintained a scientific diary noting his symptoms over the course of the 24 hours in which it took him to die. (The venom is an anti coagulent, you bleed to death.) In 1962, Perkins returned to the St. Louis Zoo, this time as director. During his time at the Lincoln Park Zoo, Perkins joined Sir Edmund Hillary as the zoologist for Hillary's 1960 Himalayan expedition to search for the legendary Yeti. Perkins was the host of Zoo Parade, a television program that originated from the Lincoln Park Zoo on NBC station WNBQ-TV (now WMAQ-TV) when he was the director there.