Naturalist Jane Goodall, who revolutionised our understanding of primates, has died at the age of 91 while on a speaking tour.

The institute Goodall founded announced on Thursday (AEST) that she had died of natural causes while in Los Angeles, California.

She died “peacefully in her sleep”, the Jane Goodall Institute said in a social media post.

Goodall had spoken in New York last week as part of her Where in the World is Jane? tour and was due to speak in LA on Friday.

“Dr Goodall’s discoveries as an ethologist revolutionised science, and she was a tireless advocate for the protection and restoration of our natural world,” it said.

Inspired by the fictional jungle character Tarzan, Goodall turned her childhood love of primates into a lifelong quest to protect the environment.

Without any training, Goodall left her seaside English village to travel on a boat to Africa in a quest to better understand chimpanzees and how to protect them.

“Everybody laughed at my dream to go to Africa and live with animals,” she told ABC TV in a recent interview.

But with her mother’s support, she embarked on her dream and arrived in Tanzania.

Her method of immersing herself in the lives of wild chimpanzees upended scientific norms of the time.

Goodall gave the creatures names instead of numbers, observing their distinct personalities and incorporating their family relationships and emotions into her work.

She made the breakthrough discovery that, like humans, they used tools, for example to prise termites out of their mounds.

“In 1960 Dr Goodall established the longest-running wild chimpanzee study in Gombe National Park, Tanzania which continues to this day,” the institute said on Thursday.

“She pioneered and sustained the Jane Goodall Institute’s community-centred conservation initiatives across the chimpanzee range for over four decades.”

Goodall was a pioneer in her field, both as a female scientist in the 1960s and for her work studying the behaviour of primates.

She also drew the public into the wild, partnering with the National Geographic Society to bring her beloved chimps into their lives through film, TV and magazines.

As her career evolved, she shifted her focus from primatology to climate advocacy after witnessing widespread habitat devastation, urging the world to take quick and urgent action on climate change.

“We’re forgetting that we’re part of the natural world,” she told CNN in 2020.

“There’s still a window of time.”

In 2003, she was appointed a Dame of the British Empire and, in 2025, she received the US Presidential Medal of Freedom.

-with AAP