Long before Jane Goodall was crowned a U.N. messenger of peace, a dame commander of the British Empire and one of the world’s most acclaimed experts on chimpanzees, she was a London-born kid with a fascination for African wildlife as portrayed in the Tarzan books.
From that juvenile fancy, the onetime secretary who skipped undergraduate life but earned a Ph.D. from Cambridge found her true calling in her first visit to Kenya in 1957. Three years later, at the invitation of famed paleoanthropologist Dr. Louis Leakey, Goodall began what would become her landmark study of chimpanzee behavior.
Goodall was still doing what she loves, talking about wildlife and conservation, at the time of her death. She was in California on her latest speaking tour of the United States. The Jane Goodall Institute announced her death, attributing it to natural causes. She was 91, and further details were not immediately available.
“Dr. Goodall’s discoveries as an ethologist revolutionized science, and she was a tireless advocate for the protection and restoration of our natural world,” the Jane Goodall Institute stated in its social media announcement.
