Birute Galdikas, whose life's work turned wild orangutans into a global conservation cause, has died at 79. The Canadian primatologist, famed for her half-century of research on the endangered great apes of Borneo, died in Los Angeles of lung cancer, according to Orangutan Foundation International, the nonprofit she founded in 1986, reports CBC News. She had been mentored by famed paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey, as were Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey. "Like true siblings, we did not choose each other, but were fated to be tied together, often referred to as the 'trimates,'" Galdikas wrote in her 1995 memoir, Reflections of Eden: My Years With the Orangutans of Borneo, per the New York Times.
Galdikas arrived in Borneo in 1971 and built Camp Leakey in what is now Tanjung Puting National Park. Enduring isolation, illness, and even kidnapping, she documented orangutan behavior in unprecedented detail—from their solitary habits and wide-ranging diet to the nearly eight-year gap between births. Her National Geographic cover stories in the 1970s brought worldwide attention to the species' decline and her rehabilitation work, and she and her team ultimately returned more than 500 confiscated or captive orangutans to the wild. "Everything she did was for them," says Ruth Linsky of Simon Fraser University in Canada. "She was a really unique soul in that way."
Galdikas, a winner of the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement, spent decades fighting deforestation, the orangutan pet trade, and habitat loss, warning in 2000 that if orangutans vanished from the wild, "paradise is gone."
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