Jane Goodall is a world famous primatologist. She is the founder of the Jane Goodall Institute in Tanzania and became famous for a forty five year study of chimpanzees that contributed much to modern understanding of their social structure and family life.
Jane Goodall was born in London, England in the year 1934. Her birthday is the third of April. After the divorce of her parents when she was twelve years old, she moved to the town of Bournemouth, where she met Sir David Attenborough, the famous naturalist (and brother of distinguished British actor Richard Attenborough). In 1957, at the age of twenty three, Jane Goodall got a job as a secretary to anthropologist Louis Leakey and accompanied him on a trip to Kenya, where she first started studying chimps in the area now known as the Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Reserve.
Over the next forty five years, Jane Goodall would famously study the lives and social structure of chimpanzees, with her work being documented in dozens of television programs and films. She founded the Jane Goodall Institute in 1977 to protect the chimpanzees of the Gombe area and around the world, as well as support her research. Jane Goodall was responsible for the discovery that chimpanzees can make tools, fashioning sticks suitable for luring edible termites out of their mounds. She also discovered the Red Colobus monkeys hunt in a group. In addition, Jane Goodall was one of the first primate researchers to refer to her subjects by names instead of numbers, making her research more personal, and over time has influenced people of the world to see monkeys as more intelligent and similar to human beings.
As of early 2007 Jane Goodall continues to work for the preservation of chimpanzees and other animals. She is the President of the Animal Rights organization "Advocates for Animals", and she has recently been named a Dame Commander of the British Empire (in 2004).