At 17, he was living with natives in the South American jungle and, like them, wore a loincloth, got traditional tattoos, ate monkey and danced with the gods. He fell in love with a beautiful young woman, Mina, who reciprocated. They married. She soon died of malaria, and the young man pondered suicide.

This is not a wildly atypical episode in the decidedly atypical life of Roy Pinney, who survived his youthful depression to live to be four days short of 99. He died of a stroke on Aug. 9 in Manhattan, his daughter Sara Bowman said.

The New York Sun in 1946 described Mr. Pinney as “a hard man to pin down” because of his myriad achievements. Truth to tell, he was just getting started.

He became a nationally acclaimed baby photographer, wrote two dozen books on subjects like caves and biblical animals, helped create the genre of television nature shows and survived to be one of the last journalists to have covered the Normandy invasion, in which he was wounded.