March 2008 Mark received the 6th Distinguished Explorer Award from the Roy Chapman Andrews Society. Prior winners include Steve Squyres, creator of the Mars Rover; Robert Ballard, discoverer of the Titanic;  ethnobotanist Mark Plotkin;  and paleontologist Michael Novacek.  A paleontologist working in Mongolia, Andrews was the most famous American explorer of the early 20th century.

In 2007 Mark received the lifetime achievement award from the Science Museum of Long Island, previously bestowed on such luminaries as James Watson, the co-discoverer of DNA.

In 2006 he was honored with the Lowell Thomas Medal from the Explorers Club, formerly awarded to Carol Sagan, Louis Leakey, “Buzz” Aldrin, Sir Edmund Hillary, and a few others.  For the medal he descended 80 feet through the chandeliers at Cipriani Wall Street banquet hall.

The July 2004 National Geographic Magazine reported on species named after Mark such as a frog from a Venezuelan sinkhole, a beetle from 14,000 feet in the Peruvian Andes, and an ant from the Guiana.  Since then he has found more species, plus had a fictional plant has been named after him by Amy Tan in her 2005 best seller, Saving Fish from Drowning ... wow, now that's an adventure!

Mark describes himself as expert at getting to wonderful, unexplored places.  A 2000 article in Wired Magazine calculated that he traveled more than Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, and that was only the beginning: the magazine Natural History published two pages on Mark's adventures in their Centennial Issue, reproduced here with their kind permission.

Mark has climbed and studied trees as diverse as the Alerces of Chile, the eucalypts of Australia, the redwoods of California, the dipterocarps of China, and the baobabs of Madagascar.  Steve Sillett and Mark held a Guinness Record for climbing and measuring the world’s tallest tree, a California redwood (Steve has since found taller trees, damn him!)

He has been privileged to explore remote tepuis, the tall mesas that were Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s inspiration for the book, The Lost World. He works with the Venezuelan explorer-naturalist Charles Brewer, infamous subject of Patrick Tierney's (wildly inaccurate) bestseller, Darkness in El Dorado.  Read about one expedition with Charles in the National Wildlife Federation magazine, International Wildlife.  Charles has recently begun to explore gigantic new caves... more to come!

Packing 85 pounds for a weeks at a time, Mark has studied environmental change in the Galapagos with Berkeley psychologist Frank Sulloway.  A documentary is in the works, In Darwin's Footsteps.

Mark's Smithsonian Magazine account of the first U.S. scientific expedition to Iran in 20 years is a favorite -- new species and near kidnappings, what more do you want? 

Exploring the tepui mountains of Venezuela.

Fellow ant biologist Jack Longino clings to the tips of twigs 100 feet high in the cloud forest canopy, Monteverde, Costa Rica

View from on top of Autana tepui in Venezuela, 0.8 mile straight down on all sides, and not much larger than a football field at its summit.

"The Indiana Jones of Entomology"

National Geographic Radio

Why shouldn't somethin' new and wonderful lie in such a country? And why shouldn't we be the men to find it out?"

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,
The Lost World (1912)

"Mark has the soul of a 19th-century explorer, a wandering naturalist in the tradition of Darwin and Wallace. He spent two years in the rainforests of Asia for his doctoral research, and has since personally explored almost all the other major tropical forests around the world, traveling long distances by boat and on foot along the shadowed trails and climbing up ropes, towers, and ladders into the canopy."

Edward O. Wilson, twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize