March 28, 2011

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Digitizing Jane Goodall’s Legacy at Duke

A new piece by me today at the Scientific American Guest Blog, on some exciting news from the Jane Goodall Institute and Duke University: Fifty years ago, in the summer of 1960 – the same year that a US satellite snapped the first photo of the Earth from space, the same year that the CERN [...]

By Jason G. Goldman

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This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American

A new piece by me today at the Scientific American Guest Blog, on some exciting news from the Jane Goodall Institute and Duke University:

Fifty years ago, in the summer of 1960 - the same year that a US satellite snapped the first photo of the Earth from space, the same year that the CERN particle accelerator became operational, the same year that the Beatles got their name - a 26-year-old Jane Goodall got on a plane in London and went for the first time to Gombe Stream Game Reserve, in Tanzania. She carried with her only a notebook and some old binoculars. Almost every day since the day Goodall arrived there in July 1960, somebody has been watching the chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) of what is now called Gombe National Park, carefully recording their every movement...

...Duke University announced today that for the first time, fifty years of observational data from Gombe will be housed in the same location, in digitized format, so that additional researchers will be able to utilize it. Dr. Anne Pusey, chair of Evolutionary Anthropology at Duke, will run the project, which will be known as the Jane Goodall Institute Research Center at Duke.

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Goodall, J., & Pintea, L. (2010). Securing a future for chimpanzees Nature, 466 (7303), 180-181 DOI: 10.1038/466180a

Goodall J (1964). Tool-using and aimed throwing in a community of free-living chimpanzees. Nature, 201, 1264-6 PMID: 14151401

Pusey AE, Pintea L, Wilson ML, Kamenya S, & Goodall J (2007). The contribution of long-term research at Gombe National Park to chimpanzee conservation. Conservation Biology: The Journal of the Society for Conservation Biology, 21 (3), 623-34 PMID: 17531041

Jason G. Goldman is a science journalist based in Los Angeles. He has written about animal behavior, wildlife biology, conservation, and ecology for Scientific American, Los Angeles magazine, the Washington Post, the Guardian, the BBC, Conservation magazine, and elsewhere. He contributes to Scientific American's "60-Second Science" podcast, and is co-editor of Science Blogging: The Essential Guide (Yale University Press). He enjoys sharing his wildlife knowledge on television and on the radio, and often speaks to the public about wildlife and science communication.

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