World renowned primatologist Jane Goodall has died at the age of 91 during her tour of the US.
The legendary conservationist died of natural causes while staying in California, the Jane Goodall Institute confirmed in a post on Facebook on Wednesday.
‘The Jane Goodall Institute learned this morning, Wednesday 1 October 2025, that Dr Jane Goodall DBE, UN Messenger of Peace and Founder of the Jane Goodall Institute, has passed away from natural causes,’ the post read.
‘She was in California as part of her speaking tour in the United States.
‘Dr Goodall’s discoveries as an ethologist transformed science, and she was a tireless advocate for the protection and restoration of the natural world.’
Dr Goodall is widely known for her groundbreaking work with chimpanzees, which began when she travelled to the Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania in 1960.
Seventeen years later she founded the Jane Goodall Institute to support research in the Gombe park. It works to protect the species and supports youth projects aimed at benefiting animals and the environment.
Primatologist Jane Goodall has died of natural causes at the age of 91. She is pictured with a chimpanzee in her arms in 1995
Jane Goodall interacts with a chimpanzee at Gombe Stream National Park in 1965. She travelled to the park in 1960 to research the animals in their natural habitat
Born in 1934 in London, Goodall grew up in middle-class Bournemouth and said that as a young girl the idea of her becoming a scientist was almost unthinkable.
‘There was no thought of becoming a scientist because girls weren’t scientists in those days. And actually there weren’t really any men going out there living in the wild.’
So Goodall drew her inspiration from fiction and she developed two great passions: animals and Africa.
Goodall also credited her mother, novelist Margaret Myfanwe Joseph, with encouraging her to pursue a career in the male-dominated field of primatology.
‘I got my love of animals from the Dr Dolittle books and my love of Africa from the Tarzan novels,’ she said 2019. ‘I remember my mum taking me to the first Tarzan film and bursting into tears.’
Dr Goodall was just 26 years old when she travelled to what is now Tanzania with little more than a notebook and a pair of binoculars.
Goodall set out to meet the creatures she loved and this began 60 years of ground-breaking work to save them from extinction.
Going on to be a full-time primatologist and anthropologist she is considered one of the world’s leading experts on chimpanzees.
Goodall’s early love of primates developed after her father gave her a toy chimpanzee named Jubilee as a young girl instead of a teddy bear.
Goodall is pictured with Nana the chimpanzee at Magdeburg zoo in east Germany in 2004
Goodall went to Uplands School, an independent school in Poole. She left in 1952 but couldn’t afford to go to university, so she worked as a secretary at Oxford University for a few years.
In May 1956, her friend Clo Mange invited Goodall to her family’s farm in Kenya. Mange encouraged her to contact Louis Leaky, the notable archaeologist and palaeontologist and she began working as his secretary at age 23.
Goodall went to Gombe National Park in 1960 to study chimpanzees, while Leakey chose two other female researchers, Dian Fossey and Birute Galdikas, to study gorillas and orangutans.
The three became known as The Trimates or Leakey’s Angels. At Gombe, Jane withstood all manner of natural threats: malaria, parasites, snakes, storms.
In 1962 Leakey arranged funding for Goodall to go to Cambridge University to study for a PhD. She was only the eighth person in history to attend the university without a previous qualification, and in 2020 she said this was her proudest achievement.
Leakey thought that Goodall would make a perfect researcher ‘with a mind uncluttered and unbiased by theory’.
This unorthodox approach to primatology became the key to her success. Instead of numbering the chimpanzees she studied, she gave them affectionate names such as Fifi and David Greybeard.
She noticed their unique and individual personalities, an unconventional idea at the time, finding that ‘it isn’t only human beings who have personality, who are capable of rational thought and emotions like joy and sorrow’.
She also observed behaviour such as hugs, kisses and even tickling. Her work held up a mirror to our own species, suggesting many human behaviours, once thought to be unique, may have been inherited from our ancestors.
Setting herself apart from other researchers also led her to develop a close bond with the chimpanzees and to become, to this day, the only human ever accepted into chimpanzee society.
In one instance she observed a chimpanzee named David Greybeard make a tool from twigs and use it to fish termites from a nest, a ground-breaking observation that challenged the definition of humans as the only species capable of making tools.
Jane Goodall shakes hands with the late Queen Elizabeth II following the Observance for Commonwealth Day service at Westminster Abbey in 2012
Dr Goodall was also awarded a damehood in 2004, and was invested by the then-Prince of Wales, now King, at Buckingham Palace.
The primatologist said, however, that her most prized distinction was becoming the UN Messenger of Peace in 2002.
A post to the official X account of the UN said: ‘Today, the UN family mourns the loss of Dr Jane Goodall.
‘The scientist, conservationist and UN Messenger of Peace worked tirelessly for our planet and all its inhabitants, leaving an extraordinary legacy for humanity and nature.’
Maria Shriver, the former first lady of California, described Dr Goodall as ‘a legendary figure and a friend’ in a post to X.
She added: ‘I admired her, learned from her, and was so honoured to get to spend time with her over the years.
‘She stayed at her mission and on her mission. She changed the world and the lives of everyone she impacted. The world lost one of its best today, and I lost someone I adored.’
Dame Jane also founded her Roots and Shoots global leadership programme to inspire young people to change their communities, environment and local wildlife for the better.
Established in 1991 with just 12 Tanzanian high school students, the initiative involves young people in more than 60 countries.
The British primatologist took to the Greenpeace stage at Glastonbury Festival in 2024 and spoke about the planet, loss of biodiversity and climate change in a speech where she also acknowledged that ‘young people are still losing hope’.
She was due to speak at Royce Hall, a building on the campus of the University of California, on Friday October 3.
