Gorilla

This adorable baby gorilla was born through emergency c-section at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park, a procedure that is not commonly performed in animals. She weighed in at 4.6 pounds. Her mother went into labor Wednesday morning but showed no progress by evening, necessitating the c-section. The baby gorilla remains in intensive care after suffering from a collapsed lung, which she has been treated for.
A lowland gorilla (Gorilla gorilla), photographed at the Bronx Zoo.
The skeletons of Lucy (left) and Kadanuumuu (right). Both belong to the early human species Australopithecus afarensis. (Images not to scale.) I never fully appreciated how small Lucy was until I saw her bones for myself. Photographs and restorations of her and her kin within the species Australopithecus afarensis had never really given me a proper sense of scale, and when I looked over her incomplete skeleton - formally known as specimen A.L. 288-1 - I was struck by her diminutive proportions. In life she would have only been about three and a half feet tall. Her physical stature seemed…
A young lowland gorilla (Gorilla gorilla), photographed at the Bronx Zoo.
A lowland gorilla (Gorilla gorilla), photographed at the Bronx Zoo.
Friendship is beautiful.
A male lowland gorilla (Gorilla gorilla), photographed at the Bronx Zoo.
A lowland gorilla (Gorilla gorilla), photographed at the Bronx Zoo.
tags: gorilla, death, mortality, science, humor, funny, satire, fucking hilarious, Onion News Network, ONN, streaming video Tulane University researchers have successfully taught a captive gorilla that he will die one day. The gorilla, named Quigley, is now able to experience the crippling fear of impending death previously only accessible to humans.
A gorilla (Gorilla gorilla), photographed at the Bronx Zoo.
A gorilla (Gorilla gorilla), photographed at the Bronx Zoo.
A lowland gorilla (Gorilla gorilla), photographed at the Bronx Zoo.
(c) NDR Naturfilm Well, almost. Here's some info from the Wildlife Conservation Society's press release: "With the assistance of the Wildlife Conservation Society's Cameroon Program, a film crew from the Hamburg-based NDR Naturfilm managed to video the elusive Cross River gorilla earlier this year in a stand of montane trees after weeks of effort in the Kagwene Gorilla Sanctuary. The protected area was created in 2008, with the guidance of WCS, specifically to protect the world's rarest great ape. "These gorillas are extremely wary of humans and are very difficult to photograph or film,"…
Benjamin Franklin once quipped, "Where there's marriage without love there will be love without marriage." His affairs are well known in American history, however this founding father may have been stating a truth extending to evolutionary history as well. Christopher Ryan (author of the forthcoming Sex at Dawn) offers some thoughts on the role of novelty in the sex lives of our favorite primate. He suggests that men are drawn to variety in sexual partners while women are drawn to variety in technique: When researchers decided to look at this issue to develop a Sexual Boredom Scale, they…
If you tickle a young chimp, gorilla or orang-utan, it will hoot, holler and pant in a way that would strongly remind you of human laughter. The sounds are very different - chimp laughter, for example, is breathier than ours, faster and bereft of vowel sounds ("ha" or "hee"). Listen to a recording and you wouldn't identify it as laughter - it's more like a handsaw cutting wood. But in context, the resemblance to human laughter is uncanny. Apes make these noises during play or when tickled, and they're accompanied by distinctive open-mouthed "play faces". Darwin himself noted the laugh-like…
This is the sixth of eight posts on evolutionary research to celebrate Darwin's bicentennial. Physically, we are incredibly different from our ape cousins but genetically, it's a different story. We famously share more than 98% of our DNA with chimpanzees, our closest living relatives. Our proteins are virtually identical and our chromosomes have more or less the same structure. At the level of the nucleotide (the "letters" that build strands of DNA), little has happened during ape evolution. These letters have been changing at a considerably slower rate than in our relatives than in other…
Imaginative but effective ads from the Buenos Aires Zoo. Via Toxel and thanks once again to Kevin Z. "Get Much More for Less" Ads "The Kangaroos Have Arrived" Ads Many more below the fold "Now We Are Open Late" Ads "115 Years" Ads Together Video (note that we cannot endorse the historical accuracy of this friendship...) Argentine readers please take note: I still do not have a shot glass from this zoo and Labor Day is coming soon, which is a HUGE gift giving holiday up here in the States.
Wildlife Conservation Society researchers in the remote northern jungles of the Republic of Congo have made a startling discovery: approximately 125,000 western lowland gorillas - more than twice the previous worldwide estimate. Coined "the Green Abyss" by scientists and explorers eager to do some coining in a world running increasingly short on coinable areas, these remote forests are extremely swampy, making tent sites nearly impossible to find. Apparently the lack of KOA campgrounds accounts for the previous lack of research in the area and oversight of the vast majority of the population…
Sometimes, you find weird stuff on the internet. But sometimes you find even weirder stuff in scientific journals. To what do I refer? A paper in the Journal of Mathematical Geology back in 2000 entitled Godzilla from a Zoological Perspective, by Per Christiansen. This was written as a critique of the "new Godzilla" movie, arguing that it is not more biologically plausible than the "old Godzilla" of 1954. However, calculations show that his limbs and limb muscles must have been severely undersized to move his huge bulk around at even a leisurely pace, and most other biological problems with…