Dian Fossey biography

Synopsis

Early Life

Primatologist and naturalist Dian Fossey was born on January 16, 1932, in San Francisco, California, and grew up with her mother and stepfather. Developing an affinity for animals at a young age, throughout her youth, Fossey was an avid horseback rider and an aspiring veterinarian. However, after enrolling in pre-veterinary studies at the University of California, Davis, she transferred to San Jose State College and changed her major to occupational therapy.

After graduating from San Jose in 1954, Fossey spent several months working as a hospital intern in California, and then moved to Louisville, Kentucky, where she began serving as director of the Kosair Crippled Children's Hospital's occupational therapy department in 1955. Living on a farm on the outskirts of Louisville, Fossey spent many off-hours happily tending to the livestock. But her contentment didn't last long. She soon became restless, longing to see other parts of the world and setting her sights on Africa.

'Gorillas in the Mist'

In September 1963, Fossey embarked on her first trip to Africa—which cost Fossey her entire life savings at the time, as well as a bank loan—visiting Kenya, Tanzania, Zimbabwe and the Congo, among other areas. She soon met paleoanthropologist Mary Leakey and her husband, archaeologist Louis Leakey, one of the best-known husband-wife teams in the history of science. 

Fossey then met Joan and Alan Root, native wildlife photographers who were working on a documentary of African gorillas at the time, and when the couple brought her along on one of their trips in search of the primates, Fossey was instantly enamored. She later explained her draw to gorillas in her 1983 autobiographical work, Gorillas in the Mist: "It was their individuality combined with the shyness of their behavior that remained the most captivating impression of this first encounter with the greatest of the great apes," Fossey said. "I left Kabara with reluctance, but with never a doubt that I would, somehow, return to learn more about the gorillas of the misted mountains."

Back in Kentucky, Dian Fossey caught up with Louis Leakey at a lecture in Louisville in 1966, and he invited her to take on a long-term study of the endangered gorillas of the Rwandan mountain forest (Leakey believed that researching primates would greatly benefit the study of human evolution). Fossey accepted the offer, and subsequently lived among the mountain gorillas in the Democratic Republic of Congo until civil war forced her to escape to Rwanda.