Fossey, Dian (19351985)

Dian Fossey was to gorillas what Jane Goodall is to chimpanzees. Her long-term studies of Mountain Gorillas (Gorilla beringei beringei) in the Virunga Volcanoes of Rwanda, in central Africa, laid the basis for understanding the behavior and social life of gorillas in general, and all subsequent fieldworkers on gorillas have built upon her work. Like Jane Goodall, Fossey was a protégée of Louis Leakey, the renowned paleoanthropologist. On the grounds that the study of our closest living relatives, the great apes, would teach us a good deal about our own past, Leakey encouraged a number of enthusiastic individuals, almost all of them female, to study these species in the wild. Fossey and most of the others were untrained, but acquired academic training during the course of their fieldwork and in this way were able to put their own observations into perspective and so could go on to make further insights. Dian Fossey (gorillas),Jane Goodall (chimpanzees), and Biruté Galdikas (orangutans) were the three who achieved long-term observations and so have contributed most to the field.