They reconstruct the largest ape in history: Gigantopithecus.

An international team of scientists published this on January 10, 2024 in the journal Nature the definitive reconstruction of the greatest ape that ever walked Earth: Gigantopithecus, a three-meter-tall, 300-kilogram creature that went extinct over 250,000 years ago.

The first contact with this monkey occurred in 1935, when the German anthropologist Ralph von Koenigswald discovered several molars in a market in Hong Kong, which led him to doubt that after much research they were related to this monkey. prehistoric animal: He Gigantopithecus black.

One of the key aspects of the study was dating, which was carried out using six different methods and accurately demonstrated that the giant ape disappeared between 295,000 and 215,000 years ago.

Kira Westaway, a geochronologist at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, and co-author of the study, explains that such dating is one of the main challenges in trying to determine the cause of a species’ extinction. “Once you have this information, you can reconstruct what was happening in the environment at the time and try to find the reasons for the extinction.” G. Blackie“, he points out.

“Story G. Blackie is a mystery in paleontology: how could such a powerful creature go extinct while other primates adapted and survived? The unresolved cause of its disappearance has become the Holy Grail of this discipline,” Yingqi Zhang of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences said in a statement.

Gigantopithecus was a specialized herbivore that enjoyed abundant food in the rainforest. “These relatively small environmental changes took a long time to affect G. Blackie it struggled to adapt while its population dwindled,” says Westaway. “This was a gradual path to extinction, not a sudden event.”

It is believed that its large volume led to extinction, especially since it was a herbivore that was later replaced by more advanced and smaller relatives such as the orangutan, and this is in addition to climatic differences in the area that today includes the region. Guanxi, in southern China.