Jungle Women: The Scientists Who Shaped the Study of Our Primate Relatives

Sisters of the Jungle explores the history of primatology, a rare scientific discipline led primarily by women, from pioneers like Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey to author Keriann McGoogan’s own adventurous field studies.

Since the 1970s, the science of primatology has been dominated by women--a unique reversal, as men usually outnumber women in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields.

Today, one of those women is primatologist Keriann McGoogan, who has traveled to the far corners of the earth in search of wild primates. In Sisters of the Jungle, McGoogan combines stories about her own studies of howler monkeys (the loudest living primate) and lemurs (the most endangered group of animals on the planet) with those of the women who paved the way: intrepid scientists like Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, Biruté Galdikas, and Alison Jolly who broke boundaries, made astonishing discoveries and ultimately shaped the trajectory of an entire branch of science.

Keriann McGoogan has a PhD in Biological Anthropology from the University of Toronto. She spent months living in Belize, kayaking rivers in search of black howler monkeys and coping with the hardships of field science, including rainy-season floods, wasp stings and two bouts of malaria. Her memoir and first book, Chasing Lemurs: My Journey into the Heart of Madagascar (Prometheus, 2021), chronicled her nineteen months studying groups of endangered lemurs in an isolated forest region. McGoogan lives in Guelph, ON.