58 Facts About Dian Fossey

Dian Fossey studied them daily in the mountain forests of Rwanda, initially encouraged to work there by paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey.

Dian Fossey was a leading primatologist, and a member of the "Trimates", a group of female scientists recruited by Leakey to study great apes in their natural environments, along with Jane Goodall who studies chimpanzees, and Birute Galdikas, who studies orangutans.

Dian Fossey spent 20 years in Rwanda, where she supported conservation efforts, strongly opposed poaching and tourism in wildlife habitats, and made more people acknowledge the sapience of gorillas.

Dian Fossey was born in San Francisco, California, the daughter of Hazel, a fashion model, and George Edward Dian Fossey III, a real estate agent and business owner.

Dian Fossey's mother remarried the following year, to businessman Richard Price.

Dian Fossey's father tried to keep in contact, but her mother discouraged it, and all contact was lost.

At age six, she began riding horses, earning a letter from her school; by her graduation in 1954, Dian Fossey had established herself as an equestrienne.

In defiance of her stepfather's wishes for her to attend a business school, Dian Fossey decided to spend her professional life working with animals.

Consequently, Dian Fossey's parents failed to give her any substantial amount of financial support throughout her adult life.

Dian Fossey supported herself by working as a clerk at a White Front department store, doing other clerking and laboratory work, and laboring as a machinist in a factory.

Dian Fossey transferred to San Jose State College, where she became a member of Kappa Alpha Theta sorority, to study occupational therapy, receiving her bachelor's degree in 1954.

Dian Fossey interned at various hospitals in California and worked with tuberculosis patients.

Dian Fossey was originally a prizewinning equestrian, which drew her to Kentucky in 1955, and a year later took a job as an occupational therapist at the Kosair Crippled Children's Hospital in Louisville.

The Henrys invited Dian Fossey to join them on their family farm, where she worked with livestock on a daily basis and experienced an inclusive family atmosphere that had been missing for most of her life.

Dian Fossey turned down an offer to join the Henrys on an African tour due to lack of finances, but in 1963 she borrowed $8,000, took out her life savings and went on a seven-week visit to Africa.

At Olduvai Gorge, Dian Fossey met the Leakeys while they were examining the area for hominid fossils.

Dian Fossey published three articles in The Courier-Journal newspaper, detailing her visit to Africa.

When Leakey made an appearance in Louisville while on a nationwide lecture tour, Dian Fossey took the color supplements that had appeared about her African trip in The Courier-Journal to show to Leakey, who remembered her and her interest in mountain gorillas.

Three years after the original safari, Leakey suggested that Dian Fossey could undertake a long-term study of the gorillas in the same manner as Jane Goodall had with chimpanzees in Tanzania.

Dian Fossey identified three distinct groups in her study area, but could not get close to them.

Dian Fossey eventually found that mimicking their actions and making grunting sounds assured them, together with submissive behavior and eating of the local celery plant.

Dian Fossey later attributed her success with habituating gorillas to her experience working as an occupational therapist with children with autism.

Dian Fossey had arrived in the Congo in locally turbulent times.

Dian Fossey eventually escaped through bribery to Walter Baumgartel's Travellers Rest Hotel in Kisoro, where her escort was arrested by the Ugandan military.

In Rwanda, Dian Fossey had met local American expatriate Rosamond Carr, who introduced her to Belgian local Alyette DeMunck; DeMunck had a local's knowledge of Rwanda and offered to find Dian Fossey a suitable site for study.

On September 24,1967, Dian Fossey founded the Karisoke Research Center, a remote rainforest camp nestled in Ruhengeri province in the saddle of two volcanoes.

Unlike the gorillas from the Congo side of the Virungas, the Karisoke area gorillas had never been partially habituated by Schaller's study; they knew humans only as poachers, and it took longer for Dian Fossey to be able to study the Karisoke gorillas at a close distance.

Dian Fossey attempted to habituate the gorillas by copying their actions.

Dian Fossey made discoveries about gorillas including how females transfer from group to group over the decades, gorilla vocalization, hierarchies and social relationships among groups, rare infanticide, gorilla diet, and how gorillas recycle nutrients.

Dian Fossey's research was funded by the Wilkie Foundation and the Leakey Home, with primary funding from the National Geographic Society.

Dian Fossey was often hostile to Africans who entered into the protected area, even shooting roaming cattle.

Dian Fossey's bestselling book Gorillas in the Mist was praised by Nikolaas Tinbergen, the Dutch ethologist and ornithologist who won the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

On three occasions, Dian Fossey wrote that she witnessed the aftermath of the capture of infant gorillas at the behest of the park conservators for zoos; since gorillas will fight to the death to protect their young, the kidnappings would often result in up to 10 adult gorillas' deaths.

In four months in 1979, the Dian Fossey patrol, consisting of four African staffers, destroyed 987 poachers' traps in the research area's vicinity.

Dian Fossey helped in the arrest of several poachers, some of whom served prison sentences.

In 1978, Dian Fossey attempted to prevent the export of two young gorillas, Coco and Pucker, from Rwanda to the zoo in Cologne, Germany.

Dian Fossey viewed the holding of animals in "prison" for the entertainment of people as unethical.

Dian Fossey revealed the names of his five accomplices, three of whom were later imprisoned.

Dian Fossey mostly opposed the efforts of the international organizations, which she felt inefficiently directed their funds towards more equipment for Rwandan park officials, some of whom were alleged to have ordered some of the gorilla poachings in the first place.

The deaths of some of her most studied gorillas caused Dian Fossey to devote more of her attention to preventing poaching and less on scientific publishing and research.

Dian Fossey became more intense in protecting the gorillas and began to employ more direct tactics: she and her staff cut animal traps almost as soon as they were set; frightened, captured and humiliated the poachers; held their cattle for ransom; burnt their hunting camps and even burnt the mats from their houses.

Dian Fossey was reported to have captured and held Rwandans she suspected of poaching.

Dian Fossey allegedly beat a poacher's testicles with stinging nettles.

Dian Fossey's body was found face-up near the two beds where she slept, roughly 7 feet away from a hole that her assailant had apparently cut in the wall of the cabin.

However, robbery was not believed to be the motive for the crime, as Dian Fossey's valuables were still in the cabin, including her passport, handguns, and thousands of dollars in US bills and traveler's checks.

Dian Fossey is buried at Karisoke, in a site that she herself had constructed for her deceased gorilla friends.

Dian Fossey was buried in the gorilla graveyard next to Digit, and near many gorillas killed by poachers.

Dian Fossey did not mention her family in the will, which was unsigned.

Dian Fossey had other relationships throughout the years and always had a love for children.

Dian Fossey held Christmas parties every year for her researchers, staffers, and their families, and she developed a genuine friendship with Jane Goodall.

Dian Fossey had been troubled by lung problems from an early age and, later in her life, developed advanced emphysema brought on by years of heavy cigarette smoking.

Dian Fossey strongly opposed wildlife tourism, as gorillas are susceptible to human anthroponotic diseases like influenza from which they have limited immunity.

Dian Fossey reported several cases in which gorillas died because of diseases spread by tourists.

Dian Fossey viewed tourism as an interference into their natural wild behavior.

Dian Fossey criticized tourist programs, often paid for by international conservation organizations, for interfering with both her research and the peace of the mountain gorillas' habitat, and was concerned that Jane Goodall was inappropriately changing her study of chimpanzees' behavior.

Dian Fossey is generally credited with reversing the downward trend in the mountain gorilla population.

In 2014, the 82nd anniversary of Dian Fossey's birth was commemorated by a Google Doodle.

Dian Fossey is considered a saint by the God's Gardeners, a fictional religious sect that is the focus of Margaret Atwood's 2009 novel The Year of the Flood.