Science history: Dian Fossey found murdered, after decades protecting gorillas that she loved — Dec. 27, 1985
Dian Fossey was a zoologist who spent decades studying the elusive mountain gorillas of Congo and Rwanda before she was murdered.
Gorillas in the Virunga mountains. Dian Fossey came to study the endangered population of mountain gorillas in the late 1960s, and returned until her murder in 1985. (Image credit: Brent Stirton/Getty Images for WWF-Canon)
QUICK FACTS
Milestone: Dian Fossey found murdered
Date: Dec. 27, 1985
Where: Karisoke Research Center in Rwanda
Who: The murderer remains unknown
In late December 1985, a worker opened the door to a remote cabin in the Virunga Mountains of Rwanda and encountered a horrific scene: Gorilla researcher Dian Fossey, whose aggressive approach to conservation had pitted her against the local community, had been hacked to death with a machete, and her cabin had been ransacked.
Fossey had been working with an endangered gorilla population in Rwanda's Volcanoes National Park since the late 1960s. Along with Jane Goodall and Biruté Galdikas, she was one of the three "trimates" chosen by Louis Leakey to study primates in their natural habitat.
Fossey had no formal training in ethology, the science of animal behavior, when she set out for Africa. She began her field work in Kabara, Congo, living in a tiny tent and venturing out to study mountain gorillas (Gorilla beringei beringei) there. After civil war broke out in 1967, she escaped to the Rwandan portion of the mountains and set up a new research project near Mount Karisimbi in Rwanda.
Fossey was inspired by the work of George Schaller, a biologist who, in 1959, had also studied the gorillas of the Virunga Mountains.
"I knew that animals try to stay out of your way. If you go quietly near them, they come to accept your presence. That's what I did with gorillas. I just went near them day after day, which was fairly easy because they form cohesive social groups. Soon, I knew them as individuals, both their faces and their behavior, and I just sat and watched them," Schaller said in a 2006 interview.
Fossey operated on this same principle of patient, unobtrusive observation. Still, the gorillas initially fled from her, and she spent hours tracking and trailing them across the misty forest.
Dian Fossey in 1983, the year her book "Gorillas in the Mist" came out. Fossey's aggressive tactics to protect the gorillas did not earn her good will with the locals. (Image credit: Peter Breining/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)