| Dian Fossey |
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Initially encouraged to work there by famous Paleontologist Louis Leakey , her work is somewhat similar to Jane Goodall 's work with Chimpanzee s. EARLY YEARS Dian Fossey was born in Fairfax, California , but grew up in San Francisco, California , where she attended Lowell High School . She earned her Bachelor's Degree in Occupational Therapy from San Jose State College (currently known as San Jose State University ) in 1954. She moved to Louisville, Kentucky to work at a hospital, and at the invitation of a romantic ''beau'', she began thinking about visiting Africa in 1957. CAREER In 1963, she had secured financing for her trip. While in Africa, she met Dr. Leakey, from whom she managed to get a job on researching gorilla. In 1967, she founded the Karisoke Research Center , a remote rainforest camp nestled in Virunga Mountains, Ruhengeri province, Rwanda. When her photograph, shot by Bob Campbell , appeared on the cover of National Geographic Magazine in January 1970, Dian Fossey became an international celebrity on saving mountain gorillas from probable extinction. She attended the University Of Cambridge , where she received a Ph.D. in Zoology in 1974. TRAGEDY Fossey was found brutally murdered in the bedroom of her cabin on December 26, 1985. Her skull had been split, presumably by a native Panga , a tool widely used by Poachers . Dian Fossey is interred at a site in Rwanda that Fossey herself had constructed for her dead gorilla friends. LEGACY Her book ''Gorillas in the Mist'' is both a description of her scientific research and an insightful memoir of how Dian came to study gorillas in Africa. Portions of her life story were later adapted as a film '''' starring Sigourney Weaver as Fossey. The written work covers her scientific career in much greater detail, and omits some material on her personal life, such as her affair with photographer Bob Campbell (which formed a major subplot of the movie). Farley Mowat 's ''Woman in the Mists'' was the first booklength biography of Dian Fossey, and serves as a useful counterweight to the dramatizations of the movie and the focus on gorillas in her own work. A new book published in 2005 by National Geographic in the United States and Palazzo Editions in the United Kingdom as ''No One Loved Gorillas More'', written by Camilla de la Bedoyere, features for the first time Dian's story told through the letters she wrote to her family and friends. The book is published to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of her death, and includes many previously unpublished photographs by Bob Campbell. More recently, the Kentucky Opera Visions Program, in Louisville , has written an Opera about Dian Fossey. The opera, entitled ''Nyiramachabelli'', will premiere on May 23. EXTERNAL LINKS |
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