Theodore Monod; Naturalist, Expert in Many Scientific Fields

At 21, he trekked atop a lumbering camel, 10 hours a day, three miles an hour, from Mauritania, where he had studied fish, to Senegal--his first long, arduous ride across the Western Sahara Desert.

Another year, the vegetarian traveler walked 600 miles along a Saharan route without a single watering hole, to prove he could exert himself physically without eating meat.

Over seven decades he tallied about 3,230 miles, all told, by foot and camel through the Saharan sands, becoming the world’s leading expert on that vast African desert.

Theodore Monod, naturalist, marine zoologist, botanist, geologist, archeologist, pacifist and spiritualist, who liked to define himself simply as a “researcher,” died Wednesday at a nursing home in Versailles near Paris. He was 98. He had suffered a stroke last year on the eve of yet another trip to Mauritania.

Monod, born in Rouen to a long line of pastors, announced at age 5 during a visit to Paris’ botanical gardens that he would become a naturalist.

He attended the elite Ecole Alsacienne in Paris and earned a doctoral degree in science at the University of Paris. From 1922 when he signed on as an assistant, he had a long association with Paris’ Museum of Natural History, conducting research there as honorary professor of natural sciences since 1974.

Monod also in 1938 created the French Institute for Black Africa in Dakar, which he headed until 1965, immersing himself in research throughout Africa’s ocean and desert environments.

His expertise on crustaceans and fish seemed in contrast to his meticulous study of the desert, but in fact Monod studied everything. Desert cave drawings, what he saw descending into the ocean in an early 1950s Bathyscaph and inquiries into philosophy and spirituality intrigued him equally.

“My curiosity is insatiable,” he said. “If I go to the Sahara, or if I dissect the skulls of fish, it is to try to understand, to add a little more to human knowledge. That is the mission of the researcher. . . . Rejection of ignorance, the desire to know and to explain are, I think, the honor and glory of the human mind.”

Monod detailed his findings and his travels in numerous books and more than 600 articles for scientific journals. And he did it elegantly.

An International Herald Tribune writer once described Monod’s books--with titles ranging from the mundane to the whimsical, such as “The Monk Seal in the Atlantic” or “The Hippopotamus and the Philosopher”--as: “remarkable for the complexity of their language, their inner poetry and the huge breadth of their vocabulary. In Monod’s books, the desert comes alive, even at its most austere and barren.” He attributed Monod’s literary mastery to “the trained eye of a scientist allied with the sensibility of a man of deep spirituality.”

Only one book, 1973’s “Deserts,” has been translated into English.

An ardent defender of animal and human rights as well as a pacifist, Monod for the last 17 years held an annual three-day “publicity seeking” fast to mark the anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945. The Christian era ended on that day, said Monod, who daily recited the Beatitudes from the Gospel of St. Matthew in Greek and was a lifelong devotee of the liberal wing of the French Reformed Church.

Monod, who often said the adventure of exploring the desert was spiritual, believed that “spirituality is found in cities just as much as in deserts.”

The many-faceted Frenchman published his memoirs in 1990. His last book was “Seeker of the Absolute,” in which he wrote, “It would take me maybe another 200 years to exhaust my curiosity, my desire to advance the cause of knowledge.”