Before Dian Fossey, before Amy Vedder and Bill Weber, before the contemporary era of habituated gorilla groups and ecotourism, there was George Schaller. In 1959 and 1960, Schaller—then a young wildlife biologist working under the direction of John Emlen—conducted the first rigorous scientific study of mountain gorillas in the wild. His work, published in 1963 as “The Mountain Gorilla: Ecology and Behavior,” demolished a century of myth, fear, and misrepresentation that had portrayed gorillas as aggressive, dangerous monsters. It laid the empirical foundation on which all subsequent gorilla research and conservation has been built.
Who George Schaller is
George Schaller was born in Berlin in 1933 and educated in the United States, earning his doctorate at the University of Wisconsin under the mentorship of John Emlen. His career at the Wildlife Conservation Society (then the New York Zoological Society) extended over six decades, during which he conducted field studies of lions in the Serengeti, tigers in India, snow leopards in the Himalayas, pandas in China, and large mammals across Central Asia. He is widely regarded as the most influential field biologist of the twentieth century and has received virtually every significant conservation award available, including the Crafoord Prize—the equivalent of a Nobel Prize for ecology.
Schaller’s approach to field study was innovative for its time: rather than the then-standard practice of studying animals from a distance through binoculars, or inferring behaviour from tracks and specimens, he habituated wild animals to his presence through patient, non-threatening observation and then recorded their behaviour in systematic detail over sustained periods. This methodology—which he applied first to gorillas and then to lions and tigers—became the template for field primatology and carnivore ecology worldwide.
What the 1959-60 gorilla study found
Schaller spent 20 months in the Virunga volcanoes—then divided between Belgian Congo, Uganda, and Ruanda-Urundi—observing mountain gorillas in the wild for the first time from close range. His observations overturned virtually everything that the Western public and scientific establishment believed about gorillas. Gorillas, he reported, were fundamentally peaceful animals that avoided confrontation whenever possible. The silverback’s famous chest-beating display—so terrifying to early explorers and so celebrated in popular culture—was in most cases a bluff display used to warn potential threats away rather than a prelude to attack. Gorillas fed almost exclusively on vegetation, with no predatory behaviour toward other mammals. Family groups showed evidence of stable social bonds, inter-group variation in behaviour, and what appeared to be individual personality differences.
The contrast between Schaller’s observations and the prevailing narrative—in which gorillas were portrayed as dangerous, aggressive beasts that attacked humans on sight—was so stark that his book was initially met with scepticism. The American sportsman Paul Du Chaillu’s vivid nineteenth-century accounts of hunting gorillas, which described the animals charging hunters and beating their chests in fury, had shaped popular imagination for a century. Schaller’s systematic data, accumulated over 20 months, could not be dismissed, however, and his account gradually shifted scientific and public understanding in ways that made subsequent conservation efforts conceivable.
Schaller’s influence on Fossey and later researchers
Dian Fossey read Schaller’s book before arriving in the Virungas in 1967 and treated it as an essential foundation for her own work. The habituation techniques Fossey used—approaching gorillas slowly, avoiding direct eye contact, making submission gestures, mimicking gorilla vocalisations—built directly on Schaller’s observations about gorilla social signals and threat assessment. Fossey credited Schaller explicitly in her published work and corresponded with him throughout her career.
The broader methodology Schaller established—sustained individual identification, longitudinal observation, non-invasive study design, contextualisation of animal behaviour within ecological and social systems—remains the foundational approach of gorilla research today. Every gorilla researcher working in Bwindi, every conservation biologist monitoring habituated groups, and every ranger who understands the meaning of a silverback’s charge versus a bluff display is working in an intellectual tradition that Schaller established in the forests of the Virungas between 1959 and 1960.
