ululate!

Jane Goodall has died at the ripe, old age of 91, having lived a long and fulfilling life, much of it in the company of our evolutionary cousins. She was a big name in my childhood, an English primatologist and conservationist who studied, lectured, and wrote compassionately about chimpanzees. There was some contrast made, decades ago, between Goodall and another primatologist named Dian Fossey, who studied gorillas and was tragically murdered in 1985, and whose killer was never conclusively found. Goodall, Fossey, and another primatologist named Birutė Galdikas (orangutans) were members of the Trimates, a group formed by anthropologist Louis Leakey, hence the group's informal (and humorously queasy) nickname of Leakey's Angels. I never really followed Goodall's career; my peak awareness of her was during the 80s, when I was a kid watching nature and science shows (featuring Jacques Cousteau, Carl Sagan, Marlin Perkins, and so on), so news of her recent death, which I'd heard about only a day or so ago (she died on October 1 this year) came as a surprise. RIP.