Nu Apes

[Vinyadan]

Well, if these aren't interesting times if you like large mammals!
Some years ago, when the olinguito was discovered, I remember one of the researchers saying, "If we still hadn't found such a relatively large animal, about 1 kg, who knows what's still out there!"

And the answer apparently is, very large apes.

There is the Bili ape, which is an oversized subspecies of chimp with a different culture.
http://scienceheathen.com/2015/01/11...ee-subspecies/

And there is the Tapanuli orangutan, which has just been recognised as a new species. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tapanuli_orangutan

What a time to be alive!

[Yora]

That actually sounds more like taxonomically acknowledging that one known population should actually be considered two distinctive one. Wouldn't surprise me if these animals have been seen and studied for a long time.

When pelargonium was reclassified as a separate species from geranium, it wasn't like anyone discovered a new flower. They have been in millions of peoples' homes for ages.

The best place to find new large species is probably the ocean floors. While they look pretty homogenous in appearance, I wouldn't be surprised if there are full new ecosystems in regions nobody has ever looked so far.

[Eldan]

Well, the research into the Bili ape does mention a few decades of research. It's still nice, I hadn't heard about htem before.

[Vinyadan]

Given that the first news of the Bili ape reached the academic community in the nineties and people had no knowledge of this Orangutan population until 1997, I would say that this isn't a long time.
It was known that there were orangutans in Sumatra, but not that this peculiar group in the mountain forest existed.
The Bili ape story is interesting. The link that brought to them being studied were a few skulls collected by Belgian colonists in Congo, preserved in Belgium and classified as gorilla skulls. A photographer noticed that they actually had been found in an area where no gorilla lived, so he set off to look for this new gorilla group. This guy named Ammann got there in 1996, but found no ape, just another skull and a bunch of local legends about very large apes that ate big cats. He also bought a photo by photo trap from poachers.
In 2003 PhD Shelly Williams had the first reported encounter, and filmed some. During the same year, the animals were DNA identified as chimps.
In 2004 a primatologist named Hicks started researching the area. He managed to observe the chimps for 20 hours.
These are very unusual chimps. They have a unique culture, are way larger than normal, and nest on the ground, instead of trees. Their colour also looks really dark to me. For a while, scientists wondered if they were a gorilla-chimp hybrid: they are not.

Also, there might be a new gorilla species or subspecies waiting to be identified in Cameroon, in the Ebo forest. They were first spotted in 2003, and filmed in 2016.

[halfeye]

I had read about the orangutans before, but the chimps were new to me.

The chimps are by far the more interesting to me, the orangutans are apparently fairly standard orangutans, just in a different place, but the chimps seem to be abnormal compared to other chimps.

The thing about chimps being strong is sort of right, but sort of not. The thing with chimps is that the levers in their arms have the fulcrum (joint) further toward the middle of the lever than we do, which means we can achieve higher speeds, but they have higher "strength" for the same muscle mass. We are much better at throwing things than (ordinary) chimps are, we probably have a much better aim too, it's what we have specialised in.

Many thanks for posting about this.

[Anonymouswizard]

We are much better at throwing things than (ordinary) chimps are, we probably have a much better aim too, it's what we have specialised in.

The oft forgotten fact that humans are weirdly good at picking up a some and voting something. I have coordination problems and even I can hit stuff reliably. So much for 'humans only survived because of their brains'.


But these are interesting, I'll have a read later.

[hamishspence]

Given that the first news of the Bili ape reached the academic community in the nineties and people had no knowledge of this Orangutan population until 1997, I would say that this isn't a long time.
It was known that there were orangutans in Sumatra, but not that this peculiar group in the mountain forest existed.
The Bili ape story is interesting. The link that brought to them being studied were a few skulls collected by Belgian colonists in Congo, preserved in Belgium and classified as gorilla skulls. A photographer noticed that they actually had been found in an area where no gorilla lived, so he set off to look for this new gorilla group. This guy named Ammann got there in 1996, but found no ape, just another skull and a bunch of local legends about very large apes that ate big cats. He also bought a photo by photo trap from poachers.
In 2003 PhD Shelly Williams had the first reported encounter, and filmed some. During the same year, the animals were DNA identified as chimps.
In 2004 a primatologist named Hicks started researching the area. He managed to observe the chimps for 20 hours.
These are very unusual chimps. They have a unique culture, are way larger than normal, and nest on the ground, instead of trees. Their colour also looks really dark to me. For a while, scientists wondered if they were a gorilla-chimp hybrid: they are not.

In Fred G. Merfeld's autobiographical Gorillas Were My Neighbours (1956), there was a reference to a "black-faced chimp" or "choga" variety, that had many gorilla-like traits, including scent, eyebrow ridges, color, strength, and (in males) bony crest on skull. The name apparently translated as "gorilla's brother".


Maybe this is the same creature as Bili ape - making it a rediscovery?

When I google it though, the "choga" tends to come up as a cryptid, rather than as a confirmed variety. Still raises the interesting possibility that it's synonymous with the Bili ape - that the Bili ape is what caused the "choga" cryptid legend?

[Vinyadan]

It could be. The Bili chimp sometimes has a crest on the skull that resembles a gorilla's.

Do you remember where the choga came from?

Another option is that the choga was a hybrid. Chimp-gorilla hybrids are supposed to be possible, although I am not sure if they exist.

[hamishspence]

It makes a point in the book of how, anatomically, "there's no question of interbreeding between chogas and gorillas" - that they're very much a chimp variant, not a gorilla variant. I think they were supposed to be from Central Africa, though the book may have narrowed it down more.

Given that the Bili ape is not a hybrid - my theory is that the choga isn't either - it's an early recording of the Bili ape.

[halfeye]

Given that the Bili ape is not a hybrid - my theory is that the choga isn't either - it's an early recording of the Bili ape.

I suspect you mean your hypothesis, it's the same thing more or less but earlier in the sequence from idea to knowledge.

[hamishspence]

I suspect you mean your hypothesis, it's the same thing more or less but earlier in the sequence from idea to knowledge.

Fair enough.

Informally, the term is sometimes applied early - in books or TV you will often hear a character saying "I have a theory about what happened" regarding the mystery they've just been presented with, rather than "I have a hypothesis about what happened".


When I google it by author name - the books do come up. It says he was a hunter, but also took specimens for museums. And that most of the events took place in the 1920s - that he was a Commissioner of Police during WW2 (French Cameroons region) - and that he was the first author to describe how chimps used tools.

[georgie_leech]

Slight quibble: to my knowledge, hypothesis and theory are a little more distinct than just different stages of the same concept. Hypotheses are specific, like "X has this effect on Y; increasing X should increase/decrease Y, and the reverse," or "the factors W and Z don't share a causal relationship."

A theory is a body of ideas explaining and predicting observed phenomena, like "the observed qualities of W, X, Y, and Z are explained by the Theory of Examples, which further predicts that V should matter in this way." For instance, "the Theory of Evolution explains the observed facts that populations of organisms change over time, that some but not all organisms reproduce successfully, and that species occupy certain ecological niches with their environment."

Hypotheses lead to theories, but aren't the same thing. So in that sense, "the qualities described for the Choga are explained if it is in fact a Bili Ape," is a theory.

[hamishspence]

Interestingly, when I google "Bili ape" and "choga" at the same time, I do find cryptozoology pages that list "Bili ape" as one of the many synonyms of "choga".

[halfeye]

Slight quibble: to my knowledge, hypothesis and theory are a little more distinct than just different stages of the same concept. Hypotheses are specific, like "X has this effect on Y; increasing X should increase/decrease Y, and the reverse," or "the factors W and Z don't share a causal relationship."

A theory is a body of ideas explaining and predicting observed phenomena, like "the observed qualities of W, X, Y, and Z are explained by the Theory of Examples, which further predicts that V should matter in this way." For instance, "the Theory of Evolution explains the observed facts that populations of organisms change over time, that some but not all organisms reproduce successfully, and that species occupy certain ecological niches with their environment."

Hypotheses lead to theories, but aren't the same thing. So in that sense, "the qualities described for the Choga are explained if it is in fact a Bili Ape," is a theory.

I don't know whether that is correct. It seems awfully formal, which is fine in theory, but as they say, the difference between practice and theory is that in theory there is no difference between practice and theory, but in practice, there is.

Anyhow, noticed these in Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skywalker_hoolock_gibbon

The species was first described in January 2017

They have a truly appalling name, but that's what you get.

[Vinyadan]

Those fools! Don't they know that the most important thing to live a happy life in the Galaxy is not being a Skywalker, not marrying a Skywalker, not being friends with a Skywalker, not adopting a Skywalker, not being a Skywalker employee and absolutely not being the boss of a Skywalker?
Tianxing sounds cool though, it's also not hard to remember. Also, I didn't know hoolock existed, so thank you for posting that!