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Ian Redmond can still recall the first time he saw Dian Fossey among gorillas. It was a sunny day in the Virunga Mountains on the border between (what was then) Zaire and Rwanda. The mist that often shrouded the steep volcanic valleys had dissipated to reveal endless forests of hagenia and hypericum, draped with clouds of lichen.

When they emerged through a clearing into the centre of a family of gorillas, the first thing Redmond – Fossey’s young English research assistant, newly arrived in Rwanda – noticed was the incredible sense of proximity the animals displayed towards her. “The gorillas approached and looked very closely into her face,” he says. “The way they gathered around her it was clear she wasn’t just an observer.”

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The year was 1976 and Fossey already a legend. The U.S. primatologist had first arrived in the Virungas in 1967, pitching camp at 10,000-feet and determined to live alone, studying the gorillas in their natural habitat. As with her British counterpart, Jane Goodall, who studied chimpanzees in Tanzania, Fossey broke scientific boundaries, exploring the social and familial interactions of mountain gorillas, unpicking our complex relationship with these magnificent creatures.