Jane Goodall, the British primatologist who studied chimpanzees for more than 60 years and was considered one of the world’s foremost experts in the field, has died at age 91.
Her death was announced Wednesday by the Jane Goodall Institute. She died in California from natural causes.
In a statement to the Star, the institute’s Canadian branch said Goodall revolutionized science and tirelessly advocated for the protection and restoration of the natural world.
“Like millions, we are deeply affected by this loss,” the institute wrote. “Today we lost a visionary. Tomorrow, we will continue her work. Every community we support, every young leader we empower, and every partnership we build carries forward her belief that every individual makes a difference.”
Armed with little more than a notebook and binoculars, Goodall travelled from England to what is now Tanzania in July 1960 to study chimpanzees, according to the institute. Rather than observe from afar, she immersed herself in their habitat and lives, discovering chimpanzees create tools and have individual personalities.
Jane Goodall, the British primatologist who studied chimpanzees for nearly 60 years, has died at age 91.
Kelsey Wilson/Toronto Star
Her discovery, her institute said, is “one of the greatest achievements of twentieth-century scholarship.”
But her career soon expanded past primatology. She spent decades educating and advocating for humanitarian causes and protecting the natural world. In her usual soft-spoken British accent, she balanced the grim realities of the climate crisis with a message of hope for the future.
She spoke of the world’s ecology as a tapestry being slowly pulled apart by humanity’s carelessness.
“Every time a little species vanishes, it may not seem important,” she told The Associated Press in 2021. “But the thread is pulled from that tapestry and the picture gets weaker as more threads are pulled, until that tapestry, once so beautiful, is hanging in tatters.”
Jane Goodall with Bahati, a 3 year-old female chimpanzee at the Sweetwaters Chimpanzee Sanctuary, near Nanyuki 170 kms north of Nairobi in 1997.
Jean-Marc Bouju/The Associated Press file photo
From her base in the British coastal town of Bournemouth, she travelled nearly 300 days a year, even after she turned 90, to speak to packed auditoriums and people in power around the world. She even travelled to North Korea, a place she said was the worst in the world to find vegetarian food.
Between more serious messages, her speeches often featured her whooping like a chimpanzee or lamenting that Tarzan chose the wrong Jane.
Jane Goodall in Toronto
She founded the Jane Goodall Institute in 1977 to continue the study and protection of chimpanzees while also improving the welfare of local communities.
The Canadian branch of the non-profit is housed by the University of Toronto and works with Indigenous-led organizations to fulfil its core goals of eliminating environmental inequity, biodiversity loss and climate change.
Ethologist and conservationist Jane Goodall, known for groundbreaking studies of wild chimpanzees, is photographed at the Rosewood Mansion on Turtle Creek in Dallas on Oct. 2, 2024.
Tom Fox/TNS file photo
Goodall received an honorary Doctor of Laws degree in Primatology from the University of Toronto in 2008. She had also been awarded a Doctor of Science from Toronto Metropolitan University in 2001.
In 1991 Goodall founded Roots & Shoots, an environmental and humanitarian program whose hands-on projects have benefited communities, animals and the environment in more than 65 countries.
Former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said he was “heartbroken” to hear of Goodall’s death.
“She was a pioneer whose research and advocacy reshaped our understanding of the natural world. Her wisdom and compassion will live on in every act of conservation,” he wrote in a post on X.
Heartbroken to hear of Dr. Jane Goodall’s passing. She was a pioneer whose research and advocacy reshaped our understanding of the natural world. Her wisdom and compassion will live on in every act of conservation. All of us who were so greatly inspired by her will miss her… pic.twitter.com/NM5HEyftzJ
— Justin Trudeau (@JustinTrudeau) October 1, 2025
Goodall most recently visited Toronto for a lecture at Meridian Hall on Sept. 3.
In 2022, Canadian writer Margaret Atwood appeared on Goodall’s “Hopecast” where the two legendary women discussed how to balance utopian hope and dystopian doom, the challenges women are facing internationally and the urgent need to pursue environmental and social action.
Groundbreaking findings
While first studying chimps in Tanzania, Goodall unconventionally immersed herself in every aspect of their lives. She fed them and gave them names instead of numbers, something for which she received pushback from some scientists.
Her findings were circulated to millions when she first appeared on the cover of National Geographic in 1963 and soon after in a popular documentary. A collection of photos of Goodall in the field helped her and even some of the chimps become famous. One iconic image showed her crouching across from an infant chimpanzee named Flint. Each has arms outstretched, reaching for the other.
Jane Goodall, the world’s foremost authority on chimpanzees, with Nana, in 2004 at the zoo of Magdeburg in eastern Germany.
Jens Schlueter DDP/AFP via Getty Images
In 1972, the Sunday Times published an obituary for Flo, Flint’s mother and the dominant matriarch, after she was found face down on the edge of a stream. Flint died about three weeks later after showing signs of grief, eating little and losing weight.
“What the chimps have taught me over the years is they’re so like us,” she told The Associated Press in 1997. “They’ve blurred the line between humans and animals.”
“Her groundbreaking discoveries have changed humanity’s understanding of its role in an interconnected world, and her advocacy has pointed to a greater purpose for our species in caring for life on this planet,” said the citation for the prize.
Primatologist and conservationist Jane Goodall delivers the 50th George Gamow Memorial Lecture at the University of Colorado, Boulder, Colo., Oct. 1, 2015.
Brennan Linsley/The Associated Press file photo
Goodall was also named a United Nations Messenger of Peace and published numerous books, including the bestselling autobiography “Reason for Hope.”
Early life and career
Born in London in 1934, Goodall’s fascination with animals began when she learned to crawl. In her book, “In the Shadow of Man,” she described an early memory of hiding in a henhouse to see a chicken lay an egg. She was in there so long her mother reported her missing to the police.
She bought her first book — Edgar Rice Burroughs’ “Tarzan of the Apes” — when she was 10 and soon made up her mind about her future: Live with wild animals in Africa.
That plan stayed with her through a secretarial course when she was 18 and two different jobs. And by 1957, she accepted an invitation to travel to a farm in Kenya owned by a friend’s parents.
It was there that she met the famed anthropologist and paleontologist Louis Leakey at a natural-history museum in Nairobi, and he gave her a job as an assistant secretary.
Three years later, despite Goodall not having a college degree, Leakey asked if she would be interested in studying chimpanzees in what is now Tanzania. She told the AP in 1997 that he chose her “because he wanted an open mind.”
The trip 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 (460 meters) of them. She also spent weeks sick from what she believes was malaria, without any drugs to combat it.
Primatologist Jane Goodall going through slides before making a presentation in Chicago in May 1982.
Charles Knoblock/The Associated Press file photo
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.
Jane Goodall, British ethnologist and world famous expert for chimpanzees, looks at one the of gorillas of the Budapest Zoo in Budapest, Hungary, Feb. 11, 2008.
Bela Szandelszky/The Associated Press file photo
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.
‘It was payback time’
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.”
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, she began podcasting from her childhood home in England.
“If one wants to reach people, if one wants to change attitudes, you have to reach the heart,” she said in the first episode of. “You can reach the heart by telling stories, not by arguing with people’s intellects.”
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.
President Joe Biden, right, presents the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Nation’s highest civilian honor, to conservationist Jane Goodall in the East Room of the White House, Jan. 4, 2025, in Washington.
Manuel Balce Ceneta/The Associated Press file photo
“That’s what I resent with this life,” she said. “I don’t have enough time for writing.”
In her final years, she was still curious.
“The world is so full of magic and surprises,” she told AP in 2021. “I like to keep an open mind, and I like to think of magic. I don’t want us to find out all the answers.”
“One day we will learn the answers, but not on this planet.”
With files from The Associated Press