Jane Woodall with chimps

By N’dea Yancey Bragg and Kieth Matheny, USA Today

Legendary chimpanzee researcher, Jane Goodall,  has died, the conservation organization she founded announced on Oct. 1.
Goodall, 91, died due to natural causes while she was in California on a cross-country speaking tour, according to The Jane Goodall Institute.
“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 institute said in a statement on social media.
The British ethologist – a scientist who studies animal behavior within their habitat – had no formal training when she embarked on a study of chimpanzees in what would become Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania, Africa, in the early 1960s. She skyrocketed to fame thanks in part to a National Geographic documentary about her fieldwork and used her science celebrity status to advance conservation efforts for chimpanzees and other endangered species through her eponymous foundation.
“I passionately care about the natural world of which we are a part and which we depend. I love it,” Goodall told USA Today in 2021 . “I passionately care about animals. I want to fight the fact that many are becoming extinct, and I want to fight the cruelty.”
Who was Jane Goodall?
Born in London, England, in 1934, Goodall had a fascination with animals from a young age. In 1957, she traveled to Kenya where she met Louis Leakey, a Kenyan and British paleontologist and archaeologist whose fossil digs ultimately helped establish that humans evolved in Africa.
Goodall became his secretary and eventually joined him on a field expedition studying chimpanzees on the shores of Lake Tanganyika in what is now Gombe National Park in Tanzania, East Africa.
There she observed chimpanzees using grass stems to pull termites out of their mounds for food, which shattered the mainstream scientific belief that only humans made and used tools and is “considered one of the greatest achievements of twentieth-century scholarship,” according to the Jane Goodall Institute.
The National Geographic Society funded more of Goodall’s chimpanzee research and sent along cameraman, Hugo van Lawick, to document her efforts. Goodall and van Lawick later married in March 1964, and the documentary, “Miss Goodall and the Wild Chimpanzees,” released in 1965, attracted an estimated 25 million viewers in North America upon its first broadcast on CBS.
The couple had one son, Hugo Eric Louis van Lawick, known as “Grub,” and divorced in 1974. In 1975, she married Derek Bryceson, who died in 1980.
Goodall, a United Nations Messenger of Peace, was appointed a Dame of the British Empire in 2003 and awarded the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2025.
Goodall “worked tirelessly for our planet and all its inhabitants, leaving an extraordinary legacy for humanity and nature,” the United Nations said in a post on social media mourning her death.