Peter S. Ungar is Distinguished Professor and Director of the Environmental Dynamics Program at the
University of Arkansas. Before arriving at Arkansas, he taught at the
Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and
Duke University Medical Center. Ungar is known primarily for his work on the role of diet in
human evolution. He has spent thousands of hours observing wild apes and other primates in the rainforests of Latin America and Southeast Asia, studied fossils from
tyrannosaurids to
Neandertals, documented the oral health of the Hadza hunter-gatherers of Tanzania, and developed new techniques for using advanced surface analysis technologies to extract dietary information from tooth shape and wear patterns. Ungar has written or coauthored more than 230 scientific works on
ecology and
evolution for books and journals including
Nature,
Science,
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. These have focused on food choices and feeding in living primates, and the role of diet in the evolution of human ancestors and other fossil species. His book
Mammal Teeth: Origin, Evolution and Diversity won the PROSE Award for best book in the Biological Sciences, and he edited
Evolution of the Human Diet: The Known, the Unknown and the Unknowable and coedited
Human Diet: Its Origins and Evolution. His forays into popular science writing include
Teeth: A Very Short Introduction, and his most recent trade book, ''Evolution's Bite: A Story about Teeth, Diet, and Human Origins''. Ungar's work has been featured in hundreds of electronic, print, and broadcast media outlets, and he appeared recently in documentaries on the
Discovery Channel,
BBC Television, and the
Science Channel. == Selected publications ==