![]() “They will not rot in the attic of the Smithsonian without care or study,” Fossey said, in the letter. Fossey declared that she was done sharing gorilla skeletons. “Very few items of European-meaning white people slander-have hit me like this,” Fossey wrote. She was also reeling from what she claimed was an accusation leveled by Harold Jefferson Coolidge-a prominent zoologist who went on to help start the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources-“of having gorillas killed simply to obtain their skeletal specimens.” buried outside my house permanently,” Fossey wrote in a January 1978 letter to Elizabeth McCown-Langstroth, an anthropologist and collaborator at University of California at Berkeley. “I have Digit, who died terribly from spear wounds. On December 31, 1977, she experienced a severe blow: poachers killed her “beloved Digit,” a young male silverback she had grown especially close to, taking his head and hands. But by the late 70s, she had grown tired of the bureaucratic hurdles. Still, Fossey was committed to collecting the bones and sharing them with other researchers. Rwandan and American authorities had to sign off on every shipment-it was illegal to traffic in endangered animals after the 1973 Endangered Species Act became law.įossey's work inspired a conservation and study movement that lasts today in Rwanda's Volcanoes National Park. The painstaking correspondence and coordination was carried out by letter, taking days and weeks to organize. She sent the first skeleton-from “Whinny”-in 1969. “The fact that she recognized the value of these collections for science was an important innovation,” says McFarlin. Once the skeletal remains had decomposed, Fossey decided to ship some of them to the Smithsonian, the nation’s repository for important artifacts. “To help the decomposition process, she’d bury them in shallow graves,” says Matt Tocheri, an anthropologist and Canada Research Chair in Human Origins at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario, who has studied eastern mountain gorillas extensively. She knew the bones might have a story to tell, but didn’t have the equipment on site to speed up decomposition. The eastern gorillas were on their way out, and Fossey knew it, says Stoinski.Īs the gorillas died-either naturally or after being maimed in traps set by poachers to capture antelopes or other animals-Fossey started burying them, often where they were found, as it’s not exactly easy to move a 400-pound animal. When Fossey was observing the animals, only 240 or so existed in the forests of the Virunga, which straddle the eastern side of the Democratic Republic of Congo, northwest Rwanda and southwest Uganda. Much of Fossey’s focus-and the bullseye for many of the scientists who go to Karisoke-is gorilla behavior. He hoped that study of primates would shed more light on human evolution.ĭian Fossey was committed to creating a skeletal repository of the mountain gorilla, sharing specimens with the Smithsonian Institution. ![]() Like Goodall, Fossey began her study at the behest of the world-renowned paleontologist and anthropologist Louis Leakey. “She was the first to habituate them and get them accustomed to a human presence, and to individually identify them,” says Tara Stoinski, president and CEO, and chief scientific officer of The Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International. Like her peer Jane Goodall, who lived and worked with chimpanzees in the jungles of Tanzania, Fossey had become a world-renowned authority for her intimate observations of gorilla behavior. The skulls are now on view in the new exhibition, “Objects of Wonder,” that examines the role that museum collections play in the scientific quest for knowledge.įossey also gave the gorillas their names, a habit she developed while living in the wild in close quarters with the animals. Fossey shipped both to the Smithsonian Institution in 1979, for further research. One skull belonged to Limbo, a male mountain gorilla, and the other came from Green Lady, a female from the same species. And they speak to the remarkable scientific achievements she helped bring about-including helping create a skeletal repository of a key Great Ape species-the mountain gorilla ( Gorilla beringei beringei)-and putting the brakes on the potential extinction of that critically endangered species. ![]() But these skeletal remains are intertwined with the fascinating personal story of one of the nation’s pioneering female anthropologists, Dian Fossey. ![]() ![]() At first glance, the two gorilla skulls on display in a new exhibition at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History are unremarkable, except for maybe their size. ![]()
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