World renowned primatologist Jane Goodall has died of natural causes at the age of 91 during her tour of the US.
The legendary conservationist is widely known for her groundbreaking work with Chimpanzees, which she 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.
Dr Goodall passed away from natural causes while staying in California as part of her speaking tour of the US, The Jane Goodall Institute said in a post on Facebook.
‘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.’
Primatologist Jane Goodall has died of natural causes at the age of 91. She is pictured during a talk in New York last Wednesday
Dr Goodall was just 26-year-old when she travelled to what is now Tanzania with little more than a notebook and a pair of binoculars.
She 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 said: ‘My mother’s friends were horrified by this toy, thinking it would frighten me.’ Instead it was the beginning of a sixty-year-long career and until her death, Jubilee still sat in pride of place on Goodall’s dresser in London.
