Jane Goodall, the world-renowned chimpanzee expert and conservationist, has died at 91.
The famed primate whisperer died Wednesday morning from natural causes, the Jane Goodall Institute announced.
Goodall had been in California as part of a U.S. speaking tour.
Over more than six decades of research as a primatologist and anthropologist, Goodall revolutionized understanding of chimpanzee personalities and social interactions.
The British-born ethologist also dedicated her life to protecting the environment—advocating for conservation, monitoring sanctuaries, and speaking on lecture tours.
“I feel that I was put on this planet with a mission and what I’m doing now is trying to fulfill that mission. I can’t give up,” Goodall told the Daily Beast in 2020 at age 86.
Born in London in 1934, Goodall began her groundbreaking field studies on chimpanzees in 1960, when she first traveled to Tanzania’s Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Reserve to embed herself in the primates’ world.
From there, she published some of her first observations of chimpanzees’ social hierarchies, communication, parenting, and use of tools. Her work, which illuminated humans’ place in the animal kingdom, soon reached millions through popular TV specials.
Goodall’s research in Tanzania soon transformed her into an activist. According to the Jane Goodall Institute, a conservation organization she founded in 1977, “Dr. Jane Goodall went into the forest to study the remarkable lives of chimpanzees—and she came out of the forest to save them.”
For decades, Goodall called for urgent action on the climate crisis and traveled the world to raise awareness. Speaking to the Daily Beast in 2020, she emphasized the need for a “tipping point of people demanding that business and government curtail emissions.”
On “Earth Day” in April, Goodall warned in a video, “We are in the midst of the sixth great extinction of plant and animal life.”
Still, she was hopeful that “we can at least slow down climate change and loss of biodiversity” if immediate action is taken.
Among her “reasons of hope” she cited “young people” and her conservation organization’s Roots and Shoots youth program, which has educated young people about conservation in more than a hundred countries since 1991.
Named a United Nations Messenger of Peace in 2002, Goodall was honored with the Presidential Medal of Freedom earlier this year by then-President Joe Biden.
Goodall wed Dutch photographer and filmmaker Baron Hugo van Lawick in 1964. The couple had a son, Hugo Eric Louis van Lawick, but divorced after ten years. She never remarried after her second husband Derek Bryceson died of cancer in 1980.
