Link: Why are captive gorillas getting heart disease?
The Atlantic has a wonderful long-read story by Krista Langlois looking into the heart health of captive male gorillas in the U.S.: “Something Mysterious Is ...
All posts tagged with gorillas
An interview on gorilla emotions
The Pacific Standard is running a nice interview with anthropologist Barbara King, by Francie Diep: “How Do Gorillas Grieve?”. It touches on the recent killi...
Link: Skeletons of the mountain gorillas
The NYCEP blog has a great post by Natalie O’Shea, who has been helping prepare the skeletal remains of gorillas who died natural deaths within the Rwanda Vo...
Why do male bonobos have such low body fat?
I can’t be the only one surprised at how little body fat male bonobos have. A study of bonobo dissections by Adrienne Zihlman and Debra Bolter (2015) include...
Notable: Gorilla genomes illuminate phylogeography
Notable paper: Kimberly F. McManus, Joanna L. Kelley, Shiya Song, et al. 2015. Inference of Gorilla demographic and selective history from whole genome seque...
Notable: Gorilla and chimpanzee niche partitioning and life history
Notable paper: Macho GA, Lee-Thorp JA. (2014). Niche Partitioning in Sympatric Gorilla and Pan from Cameroon: Implications for Life History Strategies and fo...
Mountain gorilla visit
Chimpanzee researcher Maureen McCarthy describes a visit to Bwindi Impenetrable Forest in Uganda, to see the mountain gorillas: “Uganda’s other great apes”.
Quote: Craig Stanford on gorilla habitat threats
Primatologist Craig Stanford was interviewed about habitat threats to gorilla populations by a public radio station: “The Human Threat to Great Apes”:
Quote: Fossey on Louis Leakey's sense of humor
Dian Fossey, writing in Gorillas in the Mist about her recruitment to study the mountain gorilla:
Quote: Huxley on traveler's tales and primate discovery
Thomas Huxley devoted his 1863 book, Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature, to describing what was then known about the anatomy and biology of the living apes...
Darwin's primate phylogeny
I’m doing some reading and ran across a 2009 post by Brian Switek (“Darwin, Ardi and the African apes”), who touched on a little-appreciated aspect of Darwin...
Perils of talking to apes
Barbara King comments on Koko, Kanzi and Panbanisha, “Thoughts On Three Famous ‘Language Apes’”.
Gorilla genomics and hearing evolution
The Nature News story on the gorilla genome includes this section relevant to the evolution of hearing in gorillas and humans:
Meet Gorilla gorilla
The gorilla is the world’s largest living primate. Gorillas are presently distributed broadly across West and Central Africa, in forested areas where human a...
Scanning the ape fecome
Donald McNeil, Jr., has written up some background detail about last week’s story that falciparum malaria came from gorillas: “A finding on malaria comes fro...
Falciparum malaria came from gorillas
Malaria in humans is caused by one of five different species of Plasmodium parasites. The deadliest of these is P. falciparum, especially within Africa where...
Quote: Huxley and the gorilla mystique
Thomas Henry Huxley, in Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature:
Mailbag: Parallel knuckle-walkers
Regarding convergent evolution in the great apes, I thought it was well demonstrated that knuckle walking was convergent, because the mechanisms for spinal s...
Ardipithecus challenge explication: the pelvis
The other day, I started writing about the Sarmiento-White exchange on Ardipithecus, by describing how they disagree about the implications of the molecular ...
HIV from gorillas
A new strain of HIV has come from gorillas: “New Strain of H.I.V. Is Discovered”
P. T. Barnum's gorilla
In the course of my research for the ape strength article, I ran across an old piece from The Atlantic Monthly, in which Alexander Young gives a long satire ...
Gorilla snippets from the 1800's
I’m skipping around the net doing some historical research today, and I’ve been running across stories that try to describe apes to the general public, aroun...
Sketchbook
Here’s today’s sketchbook page:
Gorillas that persist
Good news for gorilla conservation:
Did Gen Suwa just save paleoanthropology?
That depends on whether these teeth are really from a gorilla, I suppose.