DNA taken from poop samples confirmed this and showed the animals were, as suspected, eastern chimpanzees ( Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii). A few years later, primatologist Dr Cleve Hicks and his team observed what were believed to be Bili apes for at least 20 hours in the wild.Īs reported by New Scientist in 2006, Hicks argued they were almost certainly not a new species of ape nor even a new subspecies, but simply an interesting population of chimpanzees. However, in the following years, doubt was thrown onto these bold claims. They made a distinct vocalization like a howl and were louder when the full moon rose and set The apes, she argues, could be a new species unknown to science, a new subspecies of chimpanzee or a hybrid of the gorilla and the chimp,” TIME reported in 2003. “The larger animal had a much flatter face and straight-across brow like gorillas and turned gray early in life Two or three would nest on the ground, with others low in nearby branches. This resulted in a number of mainstream publications like CNN, the Associated Press, and National Geographic reporting sensational articles about the Bondo chimp. One of the researchers on the expedition was Dr Shelly Williams, who purportedly returned from the trip to the DRC and gave interviews to the media. He also bought photographs from locals, showing bewildered people posing with the hulking bodies of massive apes they had hunted.Īlthough his mission managed to document some extremely large chimp poop and casts of footprints larger than a gorilla's, there was no conclusive proof of the Bili ape.Īnother quest to identify the mystery ape came in the summers of 20. Creepily, these strange beasts were also said to howl at the full moon. Here, he spoke to local hunters who told him about sightings of giant apes who killed lions and were seemingly immune to poisonous darts. Suspecting he might be on the cusp of a new discovery, Ammann ventured to the northern reaches of the DRC. Other aspects of the skull’s shape and size were more comparable to a chimp, plus there were no known gorilla populations living in the region where they were collected. The skulls featured a prominent “mohawk” ridge down the center just like a gorilla and, as such, were classified as gorillas. He reportedly came across a number of skulls held at the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Belgium that had been collected by Belgian colonizers near the town of Bili in the northern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), about 200 kilometers (124 miles) east of the Ebola river. One of the first scientific efforts to track down the mystery ape was made by Karl Ammann, a Swiss Kenyan photographer and conservationist, in 1996. Humans and great apes show the play face or relaxed open-mouth face, although with slightly different versions, shown by the specific AUs that are involved (chimpanzee: characterized by AU12 + 25 + 26 or by AU12 + 25 + 27, Parr et al.
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