ethology, the study ofanimal behaviour. Although many naturalists have studied aspects of animal behaviour through the centuries, the modernscience of ethology is usually considered to have arisen as a discretediscipline with the work in the 1920s of biologistsNikolaas Tinbergen of the Netherlands andKonrad Lorenz of Austria. Ethology is a combination oflaboratory and field science, with strong ties to certain other disciplines—e.g., neuroanatomy,ecology,evolution. The ethologist is interested in the behavioral process rather than in a particularanimal group and often studies one type of behaviour (e.g., aggression) in a number of unrelated animals.