Fossey Legacy — Ronan Donovan

National Geographic Magazine

Photography by Ronan Donovan, written Elizabeth Royte

The gorillas Dian Fossey saved are facing new challenges. Three decades after the groundbreaking researcher was killed in Rwanda, the ape population is growing—but is under rising pressure.

The Gorillas Dian Fossey Saved

“If Dian had not been there, probably there might have been no mountain gorillas in Rwanda today.”

Jane Goodall, Conservationist
After an intruder murdered Fossey in her bed in 1985—a crime that remains a mystery—researchers continued to work at Karisoke. The camp shut down in 1994 during the Rwandan genocide, and rebels traversing the forest ransacked it. Today the much expanded Karisoke Research Center operates out of a modern office building in nearby Musanze, and the only man-made traces of Fossey’s site are foundation stones and the occasional stovepipe.

Elizabeth Royte, Writer
Dian Fossey, an American with no experience researching wild animals, arrived in Africa to study mountain gorillas in the late 1960s at the urging of anthropologist Louis Leakey and with financing from the National Geographic Society. By 1973 the population of these great apes in the Virunga Mountains had fallen below 275, but today, thanks to extreme conservation measures—constant monitoring, intensive antipoaching efforts, and emergency veterinary interventions—there are now about 480.

Elizabeth Royte, writer

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