Jane Goodall, the world's best-known primatologist, has died. She was 91 years old.
BREAKING: Jane Goodall, the most prolific primatologist of a generation, has died. She was 91.https://t.co/qyOMRpv5Ho
— ABC News (@ABC) October 1, 2025
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Jane Goodall, the most prolific primatologist of a generation, has died. She was 91 years old.
"The Jane Goodall Institute has learned this morning, Wednesday, October 1, 2025, that Dr. Jane Goodall DBE, UN Messenger of Peace and Founder of the Jane Goodall Institute has passed away due to natural causes," the institute said on social media.
"She was in California as part of her speaking tour in the United States."
In a post on Instagram, the Jane Goodall Institute said, "Dr. Goodall's discoveries as an ethologist revolutionized science, and she was a tireless advocate for the protection and restoration of our natural world."
Goodall was born in Hampstead, London, England on April 4, 1934, to parents Mortimer Herbert Morris-Goodall, a businessman, and Margaret Myfanwe Joseph, a writer. Goodall's love of nature and animals reportedly stemmed from a stuffed chimpanzee named Jubilee, which her father had given her as a gift when she was a child.
After leaving school at 18, Goodall worked as a secretary and film production assistant until she saved enough money to travel to Africa. Once there, she worked as an assistant for paleontologist and anthropologist Louis Leakey. In 1960, Goodall established a camp in the Gombe Stream Game Reserve so she could study primates, including chimpanzees.
In 1964, Goodall married Baron Hugo van Lawick, a photographer who'd been sent to photograph her work. They had a son in 1967 and divorced in 1974. The following year, Goodall remarried Derek Bryceson, director of the Tanzanian park system. Bryceson died of cancer in 1980.
Goodall was awarded a Ph.D. in ethology from the University of Cambridge in 1965, one of the few to do so without first having possessed an A.B. degree.
In 1977, she founded the Jane Goodall Institute for Wildlife Research, Education and Conservation (the Jane Goodall Institute) in California. Its headquarters later moved to Washington, D.C. She also started the youth service program, Jane Goodall’s Roots & Shoots, in 1991.
Through her work, we learned that chimpanzees are omnivores, that they are capable of using and making tools, and that they possess complex and high-functioning social behaviors.
Goodall wrote several articles and books on her work, including In the Shadow of Man (1971) and The Chimpanzees of Gombe: Patterns of Behavior (1986).
She was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in 2003 and received several awards for her work, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2025.