Background
Grubb was born in Ealing, West London. His father William Grubb was a research chemist at the Imperial Chemical Industries and later worked as a science teacher in Scotland.
Grubb was born in Ealing, West London. His father William Grubb was a research chemist at the Imperial Chemical Industries and later worked as a science teacher in Scotland.
After his Bachelor of Science graduation in Zoology at the University College London Grubb was research assistant in the Wellcome Institute of the Zoological Society of London.
He often collaborated with Colin Groves and described several new mammal taxa including Felis margarita harrisoni (a subspecies of the Sand cat), the Bornean yellow muntjac, the Nigerian white-throated guenon, Cephalophus nigrifrons hypoxanthus, the white-legged duiker, Cephalophus silvicultor curticeps, Cephalophus weynsi lestradei, the Kashmir musk deer, and the Niger Delta red colobus. His mother Anne Sirutis was a school teacher from Lithuania. In the early 1960s he went to Street Kilda, Scotland for three years where he studied Soay sheep for his Doctor of Philosophy thesis.
In the same year he took part in the Royal Society expedition to Aldabra where he worked particularly on the Giant tortoises.
Subsequently he lectured on the University of Ghana for twelve years. His main research field was the taxonomy and distribution of African mammals.
In 1993 and 2005 he wrote the Artiodactyla and Perissodactyla sections for the publication Mammal Species of the World. He also contributed to Mammalian Species, the journal of the American Society of Mammalogists.
He published checklists of West African mammals (for instance for Sierra Leone, Gambia, and Ghana) and wrote several revisions, including on warthogs, gerenuks and buffalo.
In 1993 he co-edited the International Union for Conservation of Nature publication Pigs, Peccaries, and Hippos: Status Survey and Conservation Action Plan. After two surgeries Peter Grubb died from cancer in December 2006.