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PHOTOGRAPH BY ROBERT I.M. CAMPBELL, NAT GEO IMAGE COLLECTION
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The legendary bone digger and Nat Geo Explorer, who died Sunday at age 77, moved from archaeological sites to conservation and the political arena in later decades, writes Andrea Stone in this must-read remembrance.
A proud Kenyan, he insisted in his 20s that the country’s treasures stay within its borders, and he worked to stop poaching and to make the nation a world-class research center.
He founded the conservation group Wildlife Direct and worked with the group‘s CEO, Paula Kahumbu, to preserve ecosystems like the Serengeti. Leakey had a natural leadership style, said Kahumbu, who wrote of these conservation efforts in National Geographic‘s December issue.
Leakey, like Jane Goodall, graduated from fieldwork to advocacy to help the planet and its beings.
(Pictured at top, Leakey with his future wife, zoologist and Nat Geo Explorer-At-Large Meave Epps, on a dig in their youth; above, in 1972, Leaky and field aide Bernard Ngeneo, at right, pack fragments of a hominin skull found along the eastern shore of Kenya‘s Lake Turkana.)
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