Back in Kentucky, Dian Fossey caught up with Louis Leakey at a lecture in Louisville in 1966, and he invited her to take on a long-term study of the endangered gorillas of the Rwandan mountain forest (Leakey believed that researching primates would greatly benefit the study of human evolution). Fossey accepted the offer, and subsequently lived among the mountain gorillas in the Democratic Republic of Congo until civil war forced her to escape to Rwanda.