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The famed ethologist and conservationist did groundbreaking research on chimpanzees

Jane Goodall, the renowned conservationist and animal welfare advocate who was seen as the world's foremost expert on chimpanzees after spending decades studying them in the wild in Tanzania's Gombe Stream National Park, has died. She was 91.

According to a statement on Wednesday, Oct. 1, from her eponymous institute, she died in Los Angeles of natural causes while on a speaking tour.

She leaves behind her son, Hugo, and three grandchildren.

"Dr. Goodall’s discoveries as an ethologist revolutionized science, and she was a tireless advocate for the protection and restoration of our natural world,” her institute said.

In a lengthy tribute, the institute added that her "life and work not only made an indelible mark on our understanding of chimpanzees and other species, but also of humankind and the environments we all share. She inspired curiosity, hope and compassion in countless people around the world, and paved the way for many others."

It was Goodall's trailblazing research on the personalities and social interactions of the chimpanzees she so closely studied that changed how the public viewed its connection to the animal kingdom.

Along the way, thanks in part to her tireless public events, she achieved a rare kind of celebrity for her profession.

"We have learned so much," she told PEOPLE in 2020. "We've learned how alike chimpanzees are to us, which has changed science perception. In the early 1960s, I was told that the difference between people and animals was one of kind. We were on a pinnacle, and there was an unbridgeable chasm between us and the rest of the animal kingdom."

But based on her observations to the contrary, "that reductionist way of thinking began to crumble and now we have a different way of thinking about our relationship with all the other animals," she said.

"Hopefully, we can begin a new era of our relationship with other animals," she said. "But we're not there yet."

As one of the world's most outspoken protectors of the planet, Goodall spent years urging immediate action in the face of the worsening climate crisis.

Named as a United Nations messenger of peace in 2002, also worked for decades to protect chimpanzees from extinction.

Her fanbase included many in Hollywood and philanthropy, including celebrities such as fellow environmentalists and activists Prince Harry, Leonardo DiCaprio and Angelina Jolie.

Animal Lover from the Start

Born in England to Mortimer Morris-Goodall, an engineer, and Margaret Joseph, a novelist who wrote under the pen name Vanne Morris-Goodall, Goodall grew up "loving animals" for as long as she could remember, she told PEOPLE in 2017.

She also had big plans for the future even as a girl. "My dream of Africa started when I was 10," she told PEOPLE in 2020.

Her mother encouraged her curiosity and quest for answers and a future unlike other young women at the time, telling her, "'If you really want this … you'll find a way,'" Goodall said. "And I did."

"I decided I would have to go to Africa and live with animals and write books about them," she said.

In 1957, she moved to Kenya where she sought out a famed anthropologist and paleontologist, Louis Leakey, who hired her as his secretary.

Seeing so much promise in her intelligence and drive, he sent her to London to study primate behavior with renowned primatologists.

In 1960, she began what would become her life's work when Leakey sent her to Tanzania in East Africa to study chimpanzees in the wild.

Even though her father had given her a stuffed chimpanzee named Jubilee as a child, which she kept and cherished until her death, she didn't necessarily want to study them.

"I was in love with elephants," she told PEOPLE. "It was just that [Leakey] offered me chimps, which fit into what I see as the mission of my life."

In July 1960, at age 26, she traveled to Gombe with her mother because authorities at the time "wouldn't allow a girl on her own" into the area of conflict that had broken out in nearby Congo, she told PEOPLE in 2020.

"So my mom volunteered" to come along, she said.

Her parents were divorced by then, but her father fully supported the trip.

Major Breakthroughs in Gombe

Living in Africa wasn't easy at first.

When they first arrived, "I was off up the slopes hoping to find some chimpanzees," Goodall previuosly told PEOPLE. "Mom was left behind with our slightly inebriated cook to let air into our tent. In came air, but also spiders and big snakes and baboons."

"So there was poor Mom with these male baboons with their big teeth trying to get our food. People say, 'Oh, you were brave, Jane.' No. I was doing what I'd always wanted to do," Goodall said. "She was the brave one."

Her first breakthrough came four months later, when she was observing the gentle David Greybeard, one of many chimps she named, including Flo, Fifi and Frodo.

Watching David through binoculars, she saw him "using a piece of grass as a tool to fish for termites, then picking leafy twigs and stripping the leaves."

Sitting there in the quiet forest, she was thunderstruck.

"Up until that time, it was thought by Western science that humans were the only creatures who could use and make tools," she later said.

For the first time ever, her research also documented how chimps exhibited emotions and even personalities: "They are highly intelligent, like so many other animals, and they have emotions similar to happiness, sadness, fear, despair, grief. And a sense of humor."

Like humans, "They can be nasty, mean, brutal," she said. "But they can be loving, kind, and altruistic just like us."

She also saw how they were interacting in a complex social structure — comforting each other, kissing, hugging and building and using tools, all behaviors that until that point scientists believed only humans were able to do.

"They are so like us," she said.

In 1962, Goodall left Tanzania to study at Cambridge University, even though she hadn't earned a bachelor's degree.

She earned a Ph.D. in ethology, the study of animal behavior, becoming the eighth person to be allowed to study for a doctorate without a college degree.

That was just one of the barriers she crossed. She also became one of the most well-regarded ethologists in a field dominated by men.

She defied the beliefs of the scientific community at the time when she documented her findings about how chimps have personalities.

"Now we have a different way of thinking about our relationship with all the other animals," she said in 2020.

Two Marriages Were Enough

Goodall never wed again after her second husband left her a widow in 1980.

"Well, I didn't want to," she told PEOPLE in 2020. "I didn't meet the right person, I suppose, or potentially the right person."

Goodall first wed Dutch photographer and filmmaker Baron Hugo van Lawick in 1964.

She met him when National Geographic sent van Lawick to document her life in the forest with the chimps.

"I eventually I married him," she said.

They had a son, Hugo Eric Louis van Lawick, but she and the elder van Lawick divorced after 10 years of marriage.

In 1975, a year after her divorce, Goodall married Tanzanian parks director Derek Bryceson, who died in 1980 when she was just 46.

After his death, she was so busy with her work and her many friends that she stayed happily single.

"My life was complete," she told PEOPLE in 2020. "I didn't need a husband."

Leaving Tanzania

For two decades, Goodall raised her son and focused on the work she loved in Gombe

But in the 1980s, when she learned that chimps were being taken from the wild to be trained for the circus — or worse, to be used in medical research laboratories — she decided she had to use her clout as one of the world's leading experts on chimpanzees to help them.

In 1986, she made the difficult decision to leave Gombe.

First, she later said, she had to go see the chimps for herself in the labs.

"One of the most awful things I've ever had to do is go into the labs," she told PEOPLE.

"I don't know why they let me in actually but they did. And then the way I approached it, wasn't to reprimand them, it wasn't to tell them they were bad people," she said.

Seeing the animals "in 5 foot-by-5 foot cages with steel bars all around just alone" and dealing with "people those in white coats coming to inject them or do something nasty to them," she said, "just shattered me."

With the help of other groups and Francis Collins, then the director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, the chimps in NIH studies were moved to sanctuaries.

In 2013, Collins and the NIH retired more than 300 of the chimps it was using for research, keeping 50 in reserve.

Two years later, Collins and the NIH announced that it was ending its chimpanzee research program and would retire the 50 chimps that had been held in reserve.

"This decision was made after a special task force investigated all research protocols and found none of the research was beneficial to human health," Goodall said at the time.

But, she told PEOPLE, "It makes me sad that it took so long. There was so much suffering involved. But very grateful to Francis Collins for making that decision."

Furthering Her Legacy

In 1977, Goodall founded the Jane Goodall Institute and, in 1991, started a Roots & Shoots program to encourage young people to protect the environment.

"They are the hope for the future," she said in 2022.

For decades Goodall was one of the world's most outspoken protectors of the planet, urging immediate action in the face of the worsening climate crisis.

She also wrote more than a dozen books, including The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times in 2021.

"I’m not afraid of death. Just the dying part; it depends what you die of," she told Maria Shriver a decade ago. "I don’t now what happens when we die. I just feel there’s something else. To me, death is kind of an adventure

She remained, until the end, resolute. Until she died she "traveled the world nearly 300 days a year," according to her institute.

"Around the world, people are waking up, and they're ready for change," told PEOPLE in 2020. "I have hope, but only if we [work] together. We still have a window of time."