Eric Rodger Pianka was born in the shadow of Mount Shasta in Hilt, Siskiyou County along the California-Oregon border on January 23, 1939 and died peacefully in his home in the Texas Hill Country on September 12, 2022. His father Walter Pianka was the foreman of a lumber mill in Yreka, California, and his mother Virginia (High) the local librarian.

His passion for reptiles began as a child and he spent his life studying the ecology of desert lizards in North America, the Kalahari Desert and the Australian Outback. He was a devoted father and grandfather as well as a dedicated teacher.  He graduated from Carleton College in 1960 and earned his PhD from the University of Washington in 1965. He continued on to post-doctoral studies with Robert MacArthur at Princeton University before marrying the mother of his two daughters, Helen Dunlap. They traveled to the Great Victoria Desert together and embarked upon years of research, discovering previously undescribed species of lizards. Dr. Pianka was a professor at the University of Texas at Austin since 1968 publishing hundreds of papers and writing many books. In 1986, he was endowed the prestigious lifetime Denton A Cooley Centennial Professor of Zoology Chair. His ecology textbook has become a standard, now translated into multiple languages across the globe. As a Guggenheim Fellow and a Fulbright Scholar, Dr. Pianka lectured internationally and was also lauded with a prestigious Doctor of Science degree from the University of Western Australia in 1990.

He was predeceased by one daughter, Karen Pianka, and three siblings (Michael Pianka, Jeannine Shepard and Nicholas Pianka) and is survived by his daughter, Gretchen Pianka, and three grand-children.

He wrote his own obituary which can be found here: http://www.zo.utexas.edu/faculty/pianka/obit.html