HONG KONG — Didn't fall from the Empire State Building.
Instead, the giant ape, sometimes called the “real King Kong,” was driven to extinction by climate change that made its favorite fruit unavailable during the dry season, according to a new study published Wednesday in the journal Nature. The results have been announced.
They can grow up to 10 feet tall and weigh up to 650 pounds. Gigantopithecus brachy Hundreds of thousands of years ago, they roamed the forested plains of southern China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, feeding on fruits and flowers.
But researchers have discovered that the apes' harsh diet may have led to the species' extinction.
The herbivorous apes made the “fatal mistake of becoming reluctant to change their food preferences to find new, more nutritious foods,” the study's lead researcher Yin-chi Chan said Thursday. told NBC News.
“As the environment changed, the food this great ape preferred became unavailable. But this great ape did not adapt to its dietary preferences. It remained dependent on a diet with low nutritional value. ” he added.
Zhang, a Beijing-based paleontologist, said the creatures stuck to dense forests, while apes like orangutans quickly adapted and moved into open forests, eating small animals.
The reason for the species' extinction has been a mystery ever since a tooth was discovered in a Hong Kong pharmacy in 1935 by German-Dutch paleontologist Gustav Heinrich Ralph von Königswald. It was sold as “Dragon Tooth”.
This discovery led to extensive research for more fossils, but 85 years later, only 2,000 isolated teeth and parts of the lower jaw have been discovered. No parts other than the skull were recovered.
Without a “precise timeline” of extinctions, “we're looking for clues in the wrong places,” said Kira Westaway, one of the study's lead authors and a geochronologist at Macquarie University in Sydney. says.
However, the researchers were able to use one of the latest techniques, called “luminescence dating,” which allowed them to determine the age of the soil around the fossils in 22 caves in southern China.
From this, they concluded that the great apes went extinct between 295,000 and 215,000 years ago.
“Now we have a target zone. We have a target period. So we start looking at changes in the environment,” Westaway said.
The researchers also found clues in the fauna around the cave, with analysis of pollen and wear on the great apes' teeth showing that changing seasons led to a lack of fruit and reduced reliance on less nutritious food. It became clear that he was no longer able to earn money.
“Gigants couldn't really expand their foraging range to find more suitable food because they're so big. Orangutans are also very small, mobile, and very “It's agile,” Westaway said, adding that the new study provided a blueprint for further research into the main extinction event.
“You need to get a very precise timeline. You need to look at what the environment is doing and then look at how they acted,” she said.
From about 2 million to 22 million years ago, dozens of species of great apes lived in Africa, Europe, and Asia. Today, only gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos, and orangutans remain.
Westaway said the research could also open the door to future possibilities for how humans can adapt to adverse weather events and ensure species survival.
“This sets a precedent for trying to understand how primates respond to environmental stress and what makes certain primates vulnerable and what makes others resilient.” she says.
Source: www.nbcnews.com
