Hunting for the greatest of apes

• Autores: Colin Barras
• Localización: New scientist, ISSN 0262-4079, Nº. 3074, 2016, págs. 34-37
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Barras joins the search of King Kong and finds a whole lot of teeth. Eighty years after Ralph von Koenigswald stood dumbstruck in a Hong Kong drugstore, fossils of the giant ape remain sparse. A jawbone fragment described earlier this year is just the fourth ever found. The four pieces and several thousand teeth are their only evidence it even existed. But from these scraps, they are slowly piecing together an image of this real-life King Kong, how it lived and why it eventually vanished from the face of the planet. Subjected to von Koenigswald's expertise in extinct fauna, the so-called dragon teeth proved almost systematically to be fossils of ancient mammals, from horses to large giraffes.