Conservationist Jane Goodall has died at the age of 91. 

The British primatologist and anthropologist was best known for her work studying chimpanzees, which began in 1960. Goodall remained active in the scientific community until the day she died, and was on a speaking tour in California at the time of her passing.

Born in London in 1934, Goodall grew up in England with a love for animals, which was spurred in part by her father buying her a stuffed toy chimpanzee named “Jubilee.” 

She traveled to Africa in 1957 and later met anthropologist Louis Leakey, who saw promise in her curiosity and invited her to Tanzania to study wild chimpanzees. 

In July 1960, at the age of 26, Goodall established a field camp at Gombe Stream National Park, where she pioneered immersive observation and discovered that chimpanzees possess the ability to use tools, hunt, and form social bonds. 

Over the decades, Goodall became a fervent conservationist. She founded the Jane Goodall Institute in 1977 and launched Roots & Shoots, a youth-oriented environmental movement. 

She was named a UN Messenger of Peace in 2002 and has received multiple awards, including the Templeton Prize and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which was presented by Joe Biden in January 2025. Goodall’s later years were devoted to conservation, climate activism, and youth outreach.

Goodall was married twice and had one child. She was raised Christian and maintained a belief in a higher power, even as her scientific colleagues were atheist or agnostic. She had critical words for organized religion, choosing instead to embrace a looser approach to spirituality.

“I realized that my experience in the forest, my understanding of the chimpanzees, had given me a new perspective,” she wrote in one of her books, Reason for Hope. “I was ­utterly convinced there was a great ­spiritual power that we call God, Allah or Brahma, although I knew, equally ­certainly, that my finite mind could never comprehend its form or nature.”