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Dian Fossey (January 16, 1932 – December 26, 1985) was an American ethologist interested in gorillas. She completed an extended study of several gorilla groups, observing them daily for years in the mountain forests of Rwanda. more...

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Initially encouraged to work there by famous paleontologist Louis Leakey, her work is somewhat similar to Jane Goodall's work with chimpanzees.

Career

By 1966, she had secured financing for her trip. While in Africa, she met Dr. Louis Leakey, from whom she managed to get a job researching gorillas. Along with Jane Goodall and Biruté Galdikas, Fossey was known as one of "Leakey's Angels". She displayed a proficiency for gaining the animals' trust and named several of those she worked with, including her close "friend", Digit. In 1967, she founded the Karisoke Research Center, a remote rainforest camp nestled in the Virunga Mountains, in Ruhengeri province, Rwanda. When her photograph, taken by Bob Campbell, appeared on the cover of National Geographic magazine in January 1970, Fossey became an international celebrity bringing massive publicity to her cause of saving the mountain gorilla from extinction. She attended the University of Cambridge, where she received a Ph.D. in zoology in 1974.

Dian Fossey strongly supported "active conservation" i.e. antipoaching patrols and preservation of natural habitat as opposed to "theoretical conservation" which includes the promotion of tourism. She was also strongly opposed to zoos as the capture of individual animals all too often involves the killing of its family members. Many animals don't survive the transport, and the breeding rate and survival rate in zoos is lower than in the wild in most cases. E.g. in 1978 the gorillas Coco and Puker were supposed to be exported to the Cologne zoo for conservation's sake. In fact 20 gorillas who were defending their family members Coco and Puker had to die. In the zoo the two gorillas had no offspring. Dian also viewed the holding of animals in "prison" for the entertainment of people as unethical.

Dian Fossey is responsible for the revision of a European community project that converted parkland into pyrethrum farms. Thanks to Dian Fossey's efforts the park boundary was lowered from the 3000 meters line to the 2500 meters line.

Fossey's book Gorillas in the Mists was praised by Nikolaas "Niko" Tinbergen (April 15, 1907 – December 21, 1988) who was a Dutch ethologist and ornithologist who won the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Her book remains the best selling book about gorillas of all time.

Death

Fossey was found brutally murdered in the bedroom of her cabin on December 26, 1985. Her skull had been split by a native panga, a tool widely used by poachers, which she had confiscated years earlier and hung as a decoration on the wall of her living room adjacent to her bedroom. Fossey was found dead beside her bed and 2 meters away from the hole in the cabin that was cut on the day of her murder. Despite the violent nature of the wound, there was relatively little blood in her bedroom, although there was some spattered on her clothes, on her bed, and on the floor, leading some to believe that she was killed before the wound was inflicted.

Read more at Wikipedia.org