Education and medical career įossey attended Lowell High School. At age six, she began riding horses, earning a letter from her school by her college graduation in 1954, Fossey had established herself as an equestrienne. Her love for animals began with her first pet goldfish and continued throughout her life. Struggling with personal insecurity, Fossey turned to animals as a way to gain acceptance. Kathryn has mistakenly been cited as Dian's mother over the years.) His third and final marriage would be to Kathryn Smith around 1959. (George and Gladys would divorce by 1960. Although, by 1950, Richard and Hazel would relocate with Dian to Marin County, the same county where her father George Fossey, now married to Mrs. A man adhering to strict discipline, Richard Price offered Fossey little to no emotional support.

He would not allow Fossey to sit at the dining room table with him or her mother during dinner. Fossey's stepfather, Richard Price, never treated her as his own child. Her father tried to keep in contact, but her mother discouraged it, and all contact was subsequently lost. Her mother remarried the following year, to businessman Richard Price. Her research and conservation work helped reduce the downward population trend in mountain gorillas.įossey was born in San Francisco, California, the daughter of Hazel ( née Kidd), a fashion model, and George Edward Fossey III, a real estate agent and business owner. Although Fossey's American research assistant was convicted in absentia, there is no consensus as to who killed her. Following the killing of a gorilla and subsequent tensions, she was murdered in her cabin at a remote camp in Rwanda in December 1985. įossey 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.

įossey 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 Biruté Galdikas, who studies orangutans. It was adapted into a 1988 film of the same name. Gorillas in the Mist, a book published two years before her death, is Fossey's account of her scientific study of the gorillas at Karisoke Research Center and prior career.

She studied them daily in the mountain forests of Rwanda, initially encouraged to work there by paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey. 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. The behaviour of the mountain gorilla (1976)ĭian Fossey ( / d aɪ ˈ æ n/ dy- AN Janu– c.

Gorilla go wild