Jane Goodall, Famed Primatologist, Dies At 91

Famed primatologist Jane Goodall has died at age 91 from natural causes.

The Jane Goodall Institute announced the primatologist’s death Wednesday in an Instagram post.

While living among chimpanzees in Africa decades ago, Goodall documented the animals using tools and doing other activities previously believed to be exclusive to people, and also noted their distinct personalities. Her observations and subsequent magazine and documentary appearances in the 1960s transformed how the world perceived not only humans' closest living biological relatives but also the emotional and social complexity of all animals, while propelling her into the public consciousness.

"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 wrote in the Instagram post.

In her later years, Goodall devoted decades to education and advocacy on humanitarian causes and protecting the natural world

Goodall had been scheduled to speak Wednesday at EF Academy in Pasadena to announce a student-led effort to plant more than 5,000 trees in the fire-ravaged Pacific Palisades and Altadena, known as TREEAMS.

In a prepared statement issued before the event, Goodall said, "The TREEAMS movement represents the very best of what young people can achieve when they come together with courage and compassion. By planting trees, they are helping restore ecosystems, combat climate change, and bring healing to communities in need."

Goodall was born in London on April 3, 1934, and became fascinated by animals as a child by reading stories such as Tarzan and Dr. Doolittle. Her prized possession as a child was a stuffed toy chimpanzee named Jubilee. Goodall's mother once said she found her daughter at a young age lying in bed with a group of earthworms, trying to learn how they were able to move without legs. She also once hid in a henhouse for several hours so she could watch a hen lay an egg.

At the invitation of a friend, she traveled to Kenya in 1957 and met paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey, and it was under his tutelage that Goodall began her study of chimps in Tanzania.

The beginning was filled with complications. British authorities insisted she have a companion, so she brought her mother at first. The chimps fled if she got within 500 yards (457.20 meters) of them. She also spent weeks sick from what she believes was malaria, without any drugs to combat it.

But she was eventually able to gain the animals’ trust. By the fall of 1960 she observed the chimpanzee named David Greybeard make a tool from twigs and use it to fish termites from a nest. It was previously believed that only humans made and used tools.

She also found that chimps have individual personalities and share humans’ emotions of pleasure, joy, sadness and fear. She documented bonds between mothers and infants, sibling rivalry and male dominance. In other words, she found that there was no sharp line between humans and the animal kingdom.

In later years, she discovered chimpanzees engage in a type of warfare, and in 1987 she and her staff observed a chimp “adopt” a 3-year-old orphan that wasn't closely related.

Goodall received dozens of grants from the National Geographic Society during her field research tenure, starting in 1961.

In 1966, she earned a Ph.D. in ethology — becoming one of the few people admitted to University of Cambridge as a Ph.D. candidate without a college degree.

Her work moved into more global advocacy after she watched a disturbing film of experiments on laboratory animals at a conference in 1986.

″I knew I had to do something,″ she told the AP in 1997. ″It was payback time.″

In 1991, she worked with a group of students in Tanzania to form Roots & Shoots, which is the Institute's global environmental and humanitarian youth program.

"Through nearly 60 years of groundbreaking work, Dr. Jane Goodall has not only shown us the urgent need to protect chimpanzees from extinction; she has also redefined species conservation to include the needs of local people and the environment," according to the Institute.

Her discovery during her time in Tanzania that chimpanzees make and use tools "is considered one of the greatest achievements of 20th Century scholarship," according to the Institute's website.

"Her field research at Gombe transformed our understanding of chimpanzees and redefined the relationship between humans and animals in ways that continue to emanate around the world."

Goodall has earned top civilian honors from a number of countries including Britain, France, Japan and Tanzania. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2025 by then-U.S. President Joe Biden and won the prestigious Templeton Prize in 2021.

Goodall was also named a United Nations Messenger of Peace and published numerous books, including the bestselling autobiography “Reason for Hope.”

In later years, she pushed back on more aggressive tactics by climate activists, saying they could backfire, and criticized “gloom and doom” messaging for causing young people to lose hope.

In the lead-up to 2024 elections, she co-founded “Vote for Nature,” an initiative encouraging people to pick candidates committed to protecting the natural world.

She also built a strong social media presence, posting to millions of followers about the need to end factory farming or offering tips on avoiding being paralyzed by the climate crisis.

Her advice: “Focus on the present and make choices today whose impact will build over time.”

This is a developing story, refresh for updates.

City News Service and the Associated Press contributed to this report.