Dian Fossey

Rare card · No. 18772

Dian Fossey (January 16, 1932 – December 26, 1985) was an American primatologist and conservationist known for undertaking an extensive study of mountain gorilla groups from 1966 until her murder in 1985. She studied them daily in the mountain forests of Rwanda, initially encouraged to work there by paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey. Gorillas in the Mist, a book published two years before her death, is Fossey's account of her scientific study of the gorillas at the Karisoke Research Center and her prior career. It is one of the sources for a 1988 film of the same name. Fossey was a leading primatologist and one of The Trimates, a group of female scientists recruited by Leakey to study great apes in their natural environments. Her counterparts Jane Goodall and Birutė Galdikas studied chimpanzees and orangutans, respectively. Fossey spent 20 years in Rwanda, where she promoted "active conservation", opposed poaching and tourism in wildlife habitats, and made more people acknowledge the sapience...

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