The
primatologist who worked with the mountain
gorillas of
Rwanda. One of three trained and sent out by
Louis Leakey, along with
Jane Goodall to the chimpanzees and
Birute Galdikas to the orang-utans.
Fossey was born on 16 January 1932 and was murdered on 26 December 1985. An American student who had become her lover was tried for it, but it was more likely by poachers, whose efforts she had long fought.
She was the subject of the film Gorillas in the Mist, played by Sigourney Weaver; the title was that of her 1983 autobiography.
She was born in Fairfax, California, and at first studied veterinary medicine, then worked in occupational therapy for eight years. She travelled to Africa in 1963 and began her field work in Congo (Leopoldville) in 1966. For several years after that she lived alone at the Karisoke research centre she'd founded in the Virunga Mountains. The murder of her favourite gorilla Digit led her to become an activist against poaching.
But she also studied for a doctorate in zoology at Cambridge in 1970-1974, and was an associate professor at Cornell from 1980.
Dian Fossey believed gorillas were gentle. She was the first person to voluntarily touch a gorilla. Much of our knowledge of them comes from her.