She served as the co-director of the Darwin Museum in Moscow and studied a variety of animals such as parrots, dogs, monkeys, and apes throughout her career.

Kohts was trained as a taxidermist, and had collected specimens from several expeditions including to southern Siberia, and was greatly inspired by Charles Darwin's works.

The displays included staged taxidermy, paintings and drawings of plants, animals, and their habitats, reconstructive illustrations and sculpture representing prehistoric flora and fauna, and depictions of the lives of evolutionary theorists such as Charles Darwin himself.

Kohts taught courses for women at the Moscow University, lecturing on Darwin's work and supplementing them with visual aids from his collection.

She began as a student at the Moscow Higher Women's Courses and founded the Psychological Laboratory at the Darwin Museum.

[5] So, while her husband managed the museum, Kohts carried on psychological and comparative experiments, exploring the similarities and differences between human and animal behavior and intelligence.

Russian geneticist Trofim Lysenko, who was a strong proponent of the inheritance of acquired traits and opponent to Mendelian genetics, had earned support of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin.

Under Lysenko, Soviet scientists who refused to renounce Mendelian genetics had been dismissed, sent to labor camps, or even sentenced to death.

Yerkes and his daughter visited and stayed with Kohts in Moscow in 1929 to discuss her ongoing project comparing chimpanzee and human toddler behavior.

Harlow and Kohts exchanged reprints of their works during this time, and he had an employee at his lab translate her documents from Russian to English.

After reading her published and ongoing research, Harlow admitted to Kohts that he had not given her enough credit for her work before, and that the field owed a great debt to her scientific accomplishments.

Kohts describes in unprecedented detail the expressions, emotions, and behaviors of a young chimpanzee named Joni and her own son, Roody.

Kohts documented Joni's emotions and the behaviors, facial movements, body postures, gestures, and vocalizations that accompanied each one.

The research within it is often described as being far ahead of its time and a classic that belongs on the bookshelf of any student of primate behavior and cognition.