If you’ve ever watched King Kong and thought, “wow, it would be cool to see something like that in real life,” first of all, what is wrong with you?
Second, if you lived more than 100,000 years ago, you could have gotten your strange wish.
The largest species of great ape that we know about was nearly 10 feet tall and weighed around 660 pounds.
Yikes.
The (thankfully) now-extinct species was called Gigantopithecus blacki, and it lived between 2 million and 100,000 years ago.
Gigantopithecus blacki is more closely related to the Ponginae family, which includes orangutans, and was the model for King Louie in The Jungle Book.
That said, researcher Kira Westaway says Disney had to take some liberties.
“The Jungle Book basically made him a large orangutan. We don’t know how much G. blacki would have looked like an orangutan but it was definitely a Pongine, so in the right family. As for the orange fur – we really don’t know.”
We don’t know more because there are a lack of physical remains available for study – nothing beyond a few thousand fossilized teeth and four jawbones.
Scientists have deduced the animal’s size based on these and by comparing them to the great apes that exist today.
The evidence emerged in 1935, when anthropologist Ralph von Koenigswald stumbled across some specimens labeled “dragon teeth” in Hong Kong.
The molars instead belonged to an unidentified and extinct species of great ape.
The current consensus is that Gigantopithecus lived in eastern Asian, around southern China, until it went extinct during the Early to Middle Pleistocene.
Their extinction was likely the result of climate change, as the strength of the seasons increased in East Asia, causing plants to change and grow differently.
The resulting dry periods would have made it difficult to find fruit, and for some reason, Gigantopithecus struggled to fall back onto foods like shoots, leaves, flowers, nuts, seeds, and insects.
Some people, though, believe Gigantopithecus never went extinct at all, but made the transition across the Bering Land Bridge into North America – just like human beings did.
There, they became the fodder for legends about Bigfoot, Sasquatch, and the Yeti.
There’s no evidence to support this, of course, but it is a fun theory.
For my part, I’m kind of happy a 10-foot ape doesn’t exist.
I feel like the reasons for that should be obvious.
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