Martin Humphrey Moynihan (5 February 1928 – 3 December 1996) was a behavioral evolutionary biologist and ornithologist who studied under Ernst Mayr and Niko Tinbergen, and was a contemporary of Desmond Morris. He was the founding director of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) in Panama. His early research was mainly on seagulls. Later work included the octopus, and Terence McKenna quotes Moynihan in his book Food of the Gods as saying, with respect to the octopus' ability to change its body's shape, texture and color, "Like the octopi, our destiny is to become what we think, to have our thoughts become our bodies and our bodies become our thoughts." He was married to Olga F. Linares, a Panamanian-American anthropologist and STRI senior research scientist. Moynihan died in Albi, France in 1996 of lung cancer, aged 68. References Further reading External links Martin H. Moynihan Papers, 1952–1996 from the Smithsonian Institution Archives 1928 births 1996 deaths Evolutionary biologists Ethologists Princeton University alumni Alumni of the University of Oxford Smithsonian Institution people Deaths from lung cancer American ornithologists Horace Mann School alumni 20th-century American zoologists Scientists from New York (state)