Goodall's influence spread far and wide: Those who felt it are pledging to continue her work

In her 91 years, Jane Goodall transformed science and humanity's understanding of our closest living relatives on the planet - chimpanzees and other great apes. Her patient fieldwork and tireless advocacy for conservation inspired generations of future researchers and activists, especially women and young people, around the world.

- BY CHRISTINA LARSON and TAMMY WEBBER Associated Press

PRIMATOLOGIST JANE Goodall kisses Pola, a 14-month-old chimpanzee baby from the Budapest Zoo, that she symbolically adopted in Budapest, Hungary, on Dec. 20, 2004.

((AP File Photo))

Her death on Wednesday, Oct. 1 set off a torrent of tributes for the famed primate researcher, with many people sharing stories of how Goodall and her work inspired their own careers. The tributes also included pledges to honor Goodall's memory by redoubling efforts to safeguard a planet that sorely needs it.

"Jane Goodall is an icon - because she was the start of so much," said Catherine Crockford, a primatologist at the CNRS Institute for Cognitive Sciences in France.

She recalled how many years ago Goodall answered a letter from a young aspiring researcher. "I wrote her a letter asking how to become a primatologist. She sent back a handwritten letter and told me it will be hard, but I should try," Crockford said.

"For me, she gave me my career."

Goodall was one of three pioneering young women studying great apes in the 1960s and 1970s who began to revolutionize the way people understood just what was - and wasn't - unique about our own species. Sometimes called the "Tri-mates," Goodall, Dian Fossey and Biruté Galdikas spent years documenting the intimate lives of chimpanzees in Tanzania, mountain gorillas in Rwanda, and orangutans in Indonesia, respectively.

The projects they began have produced some of the longest-running studies about animal behavior in the world that are crucial to understanding such long-lived species.