Jane Goodall, a renowned researcher who documented the behavior and social life of the Chimpanzees and later became a leader in the animal conservation movement, died on Wednesday.
Goodall was 91 years old. She died of natural causes while she was in California as part of a speech tour, the Jane Goodall Institute announced in a press release.
“The discoveries of Dr. Goodall as an ethologist revolutionized science, and it was a tireless defender of the protection and restoration of our natural world,” the statement said.
Goodall, who was born in Great Britain, became famous first for her pioneering work with chimpanzees in Tanzania in the 1960s. She quickly documented how animals lived and interacted in research that would continue for several decades.
She adopted an “unorthodox approach” of her research on chimpanzees, according to the foundation, “having placed in their habitat and their life to live their complex society as a neighbor rather than a distant observer”.
Goodall has published a study showing that chimpanzees used sticks as tools for fishing for termites, which challenged the dominant idea that humans were the only species capable of using tools. She also documented animal communication skills and complex social behavior, and helped establish that they eat meat and sometimes fight with each other.
“She has really established all these fundamental principles on the behavior of the chimpanzees that we have been able to develop in recent decades,” said Elodie Freymann, a primatologist who is a postdoctoral researcher at Brown University.
Robert Seyfarth, professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania who studied the behavior of the primates, said that the death of Goodall “marks the end of an era”.
“His observation and his prudent and detailed relationships have really obtained a whole generation – including – and many others interested in this as an area of scientific effort,” said Seyfarth.
He said that Goodall was among the first researchers to make close observations of chimpanzees as individuals with personalities and oddities, at a time when other scientists were not trained to observe these specific details.
“His perceptions of the emotions of the chimpanzees were rare,” he said, adding that Goodall was an “honest columnist” of the behavior of the species-both in the way they took care of each other and their fights and their murder.
“His program was that people understand chimpanzees in all their complexity,” said Seyfarth.
As Goodall’s career progressed and she saw how the destruction of habitat and illegal traffic threatened the survival of chimpanzees, she made animal conservation and well-being an objective of her work.
While the Jane Goodall Institute, which she founded in 1977, said, Goodall “entered the forest to study the remarkable life of the chimpanzees – and it came out of the forest to save them”.
Ingrid Newkirk, founder of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, said in a statement that Goodall helped the organization “end the confinement of chimpanzees locked in solid and solid metal chambers for experiences”.
Goodall was only 26 years old when she visited Tanzania for the first time to study the chimpanzees. She began her career without scientific training, after Louis Leakey, an eminent Kenyan-British anthropologist, hired her to record his chimpanzee observations. Goodall would later receive a doctorate from the University of Cambridge.
In an interview on the “Call Her Daddy” podcast this year, Goodall told Alex Cooper host that his first expedition was on a busting budget funded by a philanthrope.
Goodall had six months of funding, and the first four months were unsuccessful because the primates were too tight to allow him to get close enough for the observation. But one of the animals finally adapted to its presence long enough so that it can make the discovery of breakthroughs that chimpanzees create and use tools.
“The reason why it was so exciting was that, at that time, Western science was considered that only humans used and manufactured tools. We were defined as a man, the tool manufacturer,” recalls Goodall. “And so when I wrote to my mentor, Louis Leakey, he was so excited.”
This discovery stung the interest – and the financing of – National Geographic and finally changed the course of the Goodall career.
While Goodall has become an eminent figure, she used her celebrity to advance animal causes and the public interest in science. She wrote dozens of books on her interactions with chimpanzees, including many children’s books.
Freymann, the primatologist, recalled himself dressed as Goodall for Halloween in the fourth year. Later, as a 19-year-old trainee at Jane Goodall Institute in Washington, DC, she read the mail of children’s fans, she said.
“I am a primatologist because I had a hero whom I could admire,” said Freymann, who is now 29 years old. “She encouraged all my generation to go out and do it. … She has established the course of my whole life professionally and the values in which I believe.”
CORRECTION (October 1, 2025, 11:38 p.m. HE): Due to a publishing error, a previous version of this article called Primatologist Elodie Freymann as “HE”. Freymann is a woman.
