Jane Goodall, one of the world’s most revered conservationists, who earned scientific stature and global celebrity by chronicling the distinctive behavior of wild chimpanzees in East Africa — primates that used tools and engaged in organized warfare — died Wednesday in Los Angeles. She was 91.
Her death, while on a speaking tour, was confirmed by the Jane Goodall Institute, whose U.S. headquarters are in Washington, D.C.
The British-born Goodall was 29 in the summer of 1963 when the National Geographic Society, which was financially supporting her field studies in the Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Reserve in what is now Tanzania, published her 7,500-word, 37-page account of the lives of the troop of primates she had observed.
The article, with photographs by Hugo van Lawick, a Dutch wildlife photographer whom she later married, also described her struggles to overcome disease, predators and frustration as she tried to get close to the chimps, working from a primitive research station along the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika.
On the scientific merits alone, Goodall’s discoveries about how wild chimpanzees raised their young, established leadership, socialized and communicated broke new ground and attracted immense attention and respect among researchers. Stephen Jay Gould, an evolutionary biologist and science historian, said her work with chimpanzees “represents one of the Western world’s great scientific achievements.”
Her writing gained its widest attention in three more long articles in National Geographic in the 1960s and ’70s and in three well-received books, “My Friends, the Wild Chimpanzees” (1967), “In the Shadow of Man” (1971) and “Through a Window” (1990).
Goodall’s willingness to challenge scientific convention and shape the details of her arduous research into a riveting adventure narrative turned her into a household name, in no small part thanks to the power of television.
In December 1965, CBS News broadcast a documentary of her work in prime time, the first in a long string of nationally and internationally televised special reports about the chimpanzees of Gombe and the woman chronicling what she called their “rich emotional life.”
And in becoming one of the most famous scientists of the 20th century, Goodall opened the door for more women in science. Women came to dominate the field of primate behavior research.
In the 1970s, Goodall began to spend less time observing chimpanzees and far more time seeking to protect them and their disappearing habitat. She traveled the world with a message of hope and confidence that the world would recognize the importance of preserving its natural resources.
In 1974, she divorced van Lawick and soon afterward married Derek Bryceson, the director of national parks in Tanzania. He died of cancer in 1980.
She established the Jane Goodall Institute in 1977. It evolved into one of the world’s largest nonprofit global research and conservation organizations, with offices in the United States and 34 other nations. Its Roots and Shoots program teaches young people about conservation in 120 countries.
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