New Great Ape Discovered?

DrLudicrous writes "CNN is running a story about sightings of an ape in central Africa that doesn't seem to fit the description of known apes. Pictures of the animal are rare, but it seems slightly taller than most gorillas, with a flatter face. One woman even reported seeing it walk upright on two legs. It has been hypothesized that the ape might be a new species, a subspecies, or perhaps a hybrid between two other species."

evolution

[Ugodown]

The article didn't mention anything about how it might be considered a 'missing link'. It it is indeed its own species, this discovery will have significant anthropological rammifications. If it is just a hybrid, this discovery might not mean much.

Re:What is amazing is..

[errl]

Not really, they state that it could be a hybrid of a gorilla and a chimp, if that is the case, the hybrid could have been quite newly "created".

Re:What is amazing is..

[BiggerIsBetter]

There are tribes in the Amazon that have been undiscovered until very recently, and there are untold numbers of smaller species that are discovered regularly.

The impressive thing here is that it's a large primate that acts rather unlike other primates. My call is either it's a hoax, or it's that missing link anthropologists have been searching for. If it's the latter, it's a huge discovery.

Great, a new species...

[Anonymous Coward]

"..just what I was looking for.. a species that was still not killed by my cold, dead hands.."
"James! ..prepare the Rolls.. we are heading for afrika (again)."
[walks off the stage] with his shiny new sub-machine gun. Loaded but not released, yet.

Not impressed

[dnoyeb]

Don't show me some new ape, then claim you had trouble with your camera. Those pictures are horrible. What are those from a satellite???

Sorry, I am just not buying it. This is 2004 and that lame ass picture that I can't tell WTH its showing is your best?

go away.

Re:What is amazing is..

[TomV]

although technically speaking, if they spotted a female with offspring and it IS a gorilla-chimp hybrid then neither gorillas, chimps, nor this creature would constitute separate species from eachother.

TomV

Re: What is amazing is..

[Black Parrot]

> My call is either it's a hoax, or it's that missing link anthropologists have been searching for. If it's the latter, it's a huge discovery.

No one is looking for any "missing link". The fossil record is full of "missing links", and the joke is that every time you find one you create two more, one to either side.

Probably a large chimpanzee

[heironymouscoward]

I presume the term "new species" means one that homo sapiens sapiens has not yet discovered and put on the menu. Theorising this to be a "hybrid" is simply fantastic speculation: Occam's razor suggests that it's a relative of the species already known, and given the description of the flat face, it would be a large chimpanzee.
If this is not a hoax, it will probably be found that local people know of the species and consider them to be "men of the forest" or whatever. Second prediction: the unfortunate animals will rapidly end up on the "bushmeat" menu of those freaks who enjoy eating the flesh of near-human species such as gorillas and chimpanzees. Third prediction: the study of the giant chimp (if that it is) will be limited to skulls, thighbones, and the occasional skin, with the wild population extinct and maybe one or two sad individuals "liberated" and stuck in zoo prisons.
Central Africa has two species of gorilla and three subspecies of chimpanzee, and large chimpanzee individuals are not unknown. So it's most likely this is another chimpanzee subspecies that has adopted gorilla habits (such as sleeping on the ground) simply because it's too large to nest in trees.
We should be treating these near-human cousin species with respect, but it seems that chimpanzees and gorillas are of most interest to humans because they are edible.

Re:Compare this to the "mystery ape" in Nortwest U

[DCheesi]

If it was anyone other than ape researchers, they would have been laughed at. Given the fact that they have access to real apes, I don't think their evidence is any more solid than the various bigfoot/yeti/etc. sightings around the world. Eg. instead of a guy in an ape suit, you take a picture of a gorilla from a weird angle; same with the skulls, dung, etc.

On the other hand, if they do find something real, it will be used to support the claims of crackpot bigfoot-hunters everywhere. If they could miss an entire species in africa for so long, why not elsewhere? Either way, get ready for ape-hoax field day in the near future...

Re:What is amazing is..

[mishac]

Thats not a completely valid test...over the years they've found a few female mules capable of being impregnated by a horse or donkey. In addition, female big-cat hybrids, like "Ligers" and "Tigons" or "Jaguleps", etc, are often fertile, and can be impregnated to produce 3-species hybrids (Do a google search for "Lijagulep" or "Ti-liger"...to lazy to do it myself). So maybe the criteria should be that species are seperate if they can't produce fertile *MALE* offspring....

Re:What is amazing is..

[forgotmypassword]

Science doesn't get reality right a good precentage of the time; of course, this is just brushed under the carpet as 'statistical anomalies' where it doesn't fit a particular neatly held concept of how the system being measured works - and the simple act of measuring it can change the thing you intend to measure anyway.

Ehh. Most all biologists know that the concept of species is nonexistant idea only used for simple comprehension. There is no scientific model that has ever been found to be absolutely true. Even Dirac's theory of the electron is just a model.

I don't think you get what science is about at all. Maybe you had a bad teacher in high school or something. But a scientist that sweeps disagreeable data under the carpet is a bad scientist. And investigating events in nature that disagree with well established models is a BIG and IMPORTANT part of science.

Reality is not black and white - locked like ice crystals in a frozen pond. Reality is a constantly changing and evolving mess - that will usually change at the very point where we think we have it locked down. Reality is Murphy's Law in action.

Well science does assume that the world is rational. It would be reasonable to argue against that assumption, but doing so with a computer is a bit hypocritical. Because even if you can argue that science does not give us the ultimate truth (and you can), you cannot deny that it brings many short term gains that other philosophies do not.

The ultimate hubris is to think you know, without a shred of doubt, how anything really is. Murphy usually has a way of deflating our ego at that point; if we are lucky it doesn't involve the death of anyone.

That is a key point to science. I could go so far as to say that it is the great and golden rule of Feynman himself! Nothing is known to be sure, everything is to be questioned. This is the great difference between scientific thinking and dogmatic thinking. A scientific thinker has no faith.

And none of this has anything to do with Murphy's Law - the thing that goes wrong must first be possible.

Everything is just a rough approximation, hence the abandonment of my parent's myopic view of race, religeon, and the primacy of man's scientific control over mother nature. My life is an attempt to suck less than my parents. So far, so good.

I must say that neither Einstein nor Feynman had such silly ideas about the Truth in science.

And don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Just because your stupid parents liked something doesn't mean that it is stupid too.