One of the world's foremost ethologists and animal behaviorists, Marc Bekoff has spent decades observing animals in the wild to understand their minds and discover how and why they play. His 2001 paper with Marek Spinka and Ruth Newberry reframed mammalian play as 'training for the unexpected,' proposing that play evolved to generate flexible, adaptive responses to surprise. Professor emeritus of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Colorado Boulder, he writes extensively on animal cognition, play, and compassionate conservation.
