Wondering what the biggest ape in the world is - or was? This would have to be a contest between the eastern gorilla, an extinct relative of the orangutans called Gigantopithecus from China, and Jon Brower Minnoch, a taxi driver from Washington state, USA, who died in 1983, says Stuart Blackman.
There are 28 living species of ape: chimpanzee, bonobo, human, two species of gorilla, three species of orangutan and 20 species of gibbon. A typical eastern gorilla is not quite as tall as the average human, but it’s significantly heavier, and outweighs all the others, too.
We tend to attach more importance to weight than height when gauging the overall size of an animal. (The elephant, not the giraffe, is regarded as the biggest land animal, for example.) So it is probably safe to say that the eastern gorilla is the biggest living ape species.
Or is it? Because, at over 600kg, Jon Brower Minnoch – the heaviest human on record – was more than twice the weight of the heaviest eastern gorilla.
To complicate things further, until relatively recently (in geological terms, at least), there was another likely contender.
Who was the real king kong?
The fictional King Kong was based on the giant prehistoric ape Gigantopithecus. We know of the existence of Gigantopithecus thanks to a lucky find in a Chinese traditional-medicine store in 1935, and some porcupines.
If anyone was going to realise that the two ‘dragon teeth’ being offered for sale in the shop in Hong Kong were actually the fossilised molars of a very large primate, it was Gustav von Koenigswald, a German palaeontologist.
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He went on to find further specimens in other shops that were traceable to limestone caves in southern China, where excavations turned up many more teeth and four pieces of lower jaw. Which is where the porcupines come in. Because most of the 2000-odd Gigantopithecus teeth found to date consist only of their enamel crowns.
Porcupines are known to hoard animal bones in their dens and gnaw on them as a source of the minerals they need to grow their spines. Tooth roots are eaten, too, but the crowns are not. This behaviour might explain not only why so few Gigantopithecus remains have survived, but also why those that have are so conveniently piled up in caves.
Who was gigantopithecus?
Still, plenty of information can be gleaned from tooth crowns and a few jawbones. They have enabled scientists to identify Gigantopithecus as a close relative of modern-day orangutans, to establish that it specialised in eating tough, fibrous plant material, and that its extinction around 250 thousand years ago was probably due to changes in climate and vegetation that the ape was unable to adapt to.
Going by the size of the fossils, Gigantopithecus probably stood about 3m tall and weighed between 200 and 300kg. That would make it taller and heavier, on average, than any other known species of ape, alive or dead. It would even have been taller than the tallest human on record. But it still would not have been as heavy as Jon Brower Minnoch.
Header image: Gigantopithecus © Concavenator, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons