Jane Goodall at the zoo of Magdeburg, eastern Germany, in 2004
Animal rights campaigner and primatologist Dame Jane Goodall has died aged 91.
She died of natural causes in California where she was set to appear as part of a speaking tour, the Jane Goodall Institute announced.
"She was a tireless advocate for the protection and restoration of our natural world," the institute writes in a tribute.
When Jane Goodall first went to Africa to study chimpanzees at the age of 26, she had no formal scientific training, but still managed to win the trust of the primates .
Jane Goodall was on a stage in New York city just a week before her death. She was interviewed about her extensive career and the work of her institute at a global forum.
Two days later, on 26 September, she appeared on a Wall Street Journal podcast.
She was on a speaking tour at the time of her death, and was due to speak on 3 October in California.
Her calendar says she was then scheduled to go to Washington DC on 7 October.
The website says her mission involved "building an international community of action fueled by hope is at the center of what drives Dr. Goodall and the Jane Goodall Institute".
Dr Jane Goodall was best known as a primatologist who revolutionised the study of wild chimpanzees.
When Jane Goodall first went to Africa to study chimpanzees at the age of 26, she had no formal scientific training - but still managed to win the trust of the primates, leading to groundbreaking observations.
Her discoveries would not just revolutionise our understanding of animal behaviour but reshape the way we define ourselves as human beings.
Although she was just 26 years old at the time, Jane Goodall had long dreamt of studying and living with animals.
"Apparently, from the time I was about one and a half or two, I used to study insects, anything, and this gradually evolved and developed and grew and then I read books like Dr Dolittle and Tarzan, then it had to be Africa that was my goal," she told the BBC's Terry Wogan on his talk show in 1986.
As a child growing up in London, Jane Goodall said she became fascinated by animals after reading Dr Doolittle. Her first research trip to the jungles of Tanzania was in 1960, when she was in her mid-twenties.
It was to be the beginning of a sixty-year study of wild chimpanzees. She learned to communicate with them – the embracing, playing and patting – even the kisses.
She was the first person to record witnessing an animal using a tool; a male chimpanzee digging termites out of a mound with a stick.
Until then, it was thought only humans were intelligent enough. Her observations would shape the future of evolutionary science. In 1965 she made the front cover of National Geographic.
She became an activist, working to improve the treatment of chimpanzees and to educate millions of people around the world about the environment. A native American tribe gave her the name, “sister of mother earth.”
In March 1964, Dr Jane Goodall married Dutch National Geographic photographer Hugo van Lawick at a ceremony at the Chelsea Old Church in west London.
The couple had met in Tanzania where Goodall was studying chimpanzees. They were married for a decade and had one child, a son called Hugo Eric Louis.
He was born in 1967 and spent his early years at the Gombe Stream research site in Tanzania, where Goodall studied chimpanzees and while van Lawick documented her work.
Earlier this year, Goodall told Alex Cooper's Call Her Daddy podcast the relationship "ended gradually".
“He had to go on with his career and he got some money to do films on the Serengeti, and I couldn't leave Gombe,” she said. “I had to stay … I couldn't leave Gombe, and so it slowly drifted apart. And it was sad.
"I definitely wish we could have carried on with that marriage because it was a good one.”
One year after her divorce from van Lawick, Goodall married Tanzanian parks director Derek Bryceson, who left her widowed in 1980.
