Mountain Gorilla Conservation History — The Full Timeline
The mountain gorilla was unknown to Western science until 1902 — a remarkable fact about an animal of the gorilla’s size in a continent that had been subject to increasingly intensive European exploration for four centuries. The species’ discovery, its subsequent descent toward extinction through hunting, habitat loss, and political violence, and its recovery through one of the most studied and celebrated conservation programmes in history constitute a narrative whose specific historical events illuminate the present conservation context in ways that a visit to Volcanoes National Park alone cannot fully convey.
1902 — Scientific Discovery
The mountain gorilla was first described for Western science in 1902 by Captain Oscar von Beringe, a German officer stationed in the East African colonial administration, who shot two specimens on the flanks of Mount Sabyinyo (one of the Virunga volcanoes) during a patrol. The specimens were sent to the Berlin Natural History Museum, where the zoologist Paul Matschie examined them and determined they represented a previously undescribed subspecies of gorilla, which he named Gorilla beringei in honour of von Beringe. The discovery of a large, unknown great ape through the mechanism of shooting two individuals was characteristic of the natural history documentation methods of the colonial period — the same period’s scientific expeditions to Africa killed specimens of multiple species as the primary documentation method.
The Early Hunting Period — 1902 to 1950s
From the species’ discovery through the 1950s, the mountain gorilla was collected (killed) for museum specimens, for live capture for zoos, and for trophies by sport hunters — a period in which the combination of the species’ rarity and its novelty value made it a target for scientific and commercial collection that further reduced what was already a small population. The Virunga volcanic chain was gazetted as the Albert National Park in 1925 (Africa’s first national park, established by the Belgian colonial administration in what is now DRC) partly in response to the collecting pressure on the gorillas.
1967 — Dian Fossey and Karisoke
Dian Fossey established the Karisoke Research Centre in the Rwandan sector of the Virunga in September 1967, beginning the long-term individual gorilla study that transformed the scientific and public understanding of mountain gorilla behaviour, social structure, and ecology. Fossey’s habituation of the first research gorilla families, her publication of scientific papers and the popular book Gorillas in the Mist (1983), and her anti-poaching advocacy gave the mountain gorilla a specific identity in the global conservation imagination that no other great ape had achieved. Her murder in December 1985 — still officially unsolved — further catalysed the international conservation response to the mountain gorilla’s situation.
1994 — The Rwanda Crisis and the Low Point
The 1994 Rwandan Genocide killed approximately 800,000 Rwandan people in 100 days — and came close to destroying the gorilla conservation programme in the process. The Virunga range became a refugee corridor; the Karisoke Research Centre was abandoned; the park rangers fled or were killed; and for a period of approximately two years, the gorilla monitoring programme effectively ceased. That the gorilla population did not collapse further than it did during this period — the population held at approximately 620 individuals despite the monitoring gap and the security breakdown — reflects both the gorillas’ resilience and the continued informal protection that some community members provided.
2010 to Present — The Recovery Era
The 2010 census confirmed the mountain gorilla population had grown to approximately 786 individuals. The 2015-16 census showed 880. The 2018 census surpassed 1,000. The recovery from 250 individuals in the 1970s to 1,000+ in 2018 is the most documented wildlife recovery of any great ape species and the primary evidence that the conservation model built around habituated tourism, ranger protection, and community engagement produces measurable outcomes at the species level.
