The world’s biggest primate might have gone extinct because it couldn’t reach the most nutritious fruits, according to a study published today in Nature1. The paper also offers clues on why the giant ape’s contemporary, an ancient orangutan, continued to thrive almost 300,000 years ago as the environment changed.
With an estimated height of 3 metres and weighing a hefty 200–300 kilograms, Gigantopithecus blacki was the largest primate to ever roam Earth. Anthropologist Ralph von Koenigswald discovered one of the ape’s massive teeth in a Hong Kong apothecary nearly 90 years ago. Since then, researchers have unearthed four jawbones and roughly 2,000 more teeth in caves scattered across China — but no other parts of a skeleton have been found. The scant fossil evidence has made it notoriously difficult to build an accurate picture of G. blacki, let alone the circumstances that led to its disappearance, says study co-author Kira Westaway, a geochronologist at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. “We just don’t know much about it,” she says.
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