Mystery 'Bigfoot' ape hidden inside remote museum could rewrite history books

[+Hammerclaw]

1 hour ago, psyche101 said:

When I've seen them fight in documentaries it really becomes apparent just how formidable they are. Very strong. I suppose their lifestyle is pretty much gym all day isn't it. 

With hands for feet, oh, you betcha.

Edited July 9 by Hammerclaw

[Abramelin]

On 7/8/2024 at 7:26 AM, psyche101 said:

Mystery 'Bigfoot' ape hidden inside remote museum could rewrite history books

Provocative title? Made ya look!

When the 200kg animal was first encountered by Congolese villagers they feared it was a “devil” or a “monster”. Six years on, the “Chimporilla” has eluded classification because the world’s top primatologists are split on whether it's a gorilla, chimpanzee, hybrid, or some strange new creature.

One conservationist has declared it's confounding mystery similar to the legendary North American "Bigfoot".

Kisangani University’s Dr Casimir Nebesse was part of a team that retrieved the Chimporilla's lifeless body from a tree and collected it for scientific research in 2018. He had been contacted by villagers who claimed to have killed it in self-defence. “They told us this animal had made trouble. It destroyed the crops, banana plants, cassava, then it began to attack the population of this village," he told Yahoo News Australia.

The Chimporilla was found in the town of Bayaguma on Congo's “Bushmeat Highway”, 25km from Kisangani. But despite there being hundreds of dead jungle animals strung up for sale along the notorious stretch of road, villagers had never encountered anything similar.

But one thing that appears clear is the reported uniqueness of the animal as no similar remains have been collected in the area – however an unverified story suggests villagers may have killed and eaten a female and her baby days before the male attacked.

 

 

 

Are such hybrids possible? Legends says a breed in Africa that locals call Koolakamba is quite possibly a giant chimp gorilla hybrid. 

 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koolakamba

In November 1996, a picture of an unusual ape (taken by Peter Jenkins and Liza Gadsby at the Yaounde Zoo, Cameroon) was featured in the Newsletter of the Internal Primate Protection League (IPPL). This picture showed a seemingly hybrid ape with wider face and a larger skull than that of a chimpanzee and smaller than that of a gorilla. The ape in the picture had features that seemed to belong to both the gorilla and the chimpanzee.[5]

Scientifically, it has not been determined if the Koolakamba is a subspecies of chimpanzee, a gorilla-chimpanzee hybrid, or perhaps simply a product of individual variation. Yerkes reported several "unclassifiable apes" with features intermediate between chimpanzee and gorilla in his 1929 book "A Study of Anthropoid Life." It is believed that these are regional races of chimpanzee classified as separate species by over-enthusiastic scientists.

 

 

Hybrid? New species? 

Nice to know there may still be some mysteries out there waiting for us. A new animal of significant size would be fascinating in this day and age. 

It's a Bili or Bondo Ape. And it's a normal chimp, just larger. It's genetical exactly the same as a regular chimp.

[+Hammerclaw]

The last of the Mangani.

[Guyver]

21 hours ago, Earl.Of.Trumps said:

Chimporilla? I suppose it could be but why the indecision, why no DNA tests? It's been like this for years...?

I guess they don't care because they know what it is.

Haha…chimporilla.  

[Guyver]

This is very interesting.  So, chimps and gorillas can’t breed, so…chimporilla is out….but, if you look at it while hanging in the tree, you can see it’s quite a robust specimen and it does look like a cross between a gorilla and a chimp.  It looks more gorilla like than chimp to me, so yes….this is fascinating.

[the13bats]

1 hour ago, Guyver said:

This is very interesting.  So, chimps and gorillas can’t breed, so…chimporilla is out….but, if you look at it while hanging in the tree, you can see it’s quite a robust specimen and it does look like a cross between a gorilla and a chimp.  It looks more gorilla like than chimp to me, so yes….this is fascinating.

I am guilty of thinking in general all animals in a species should look the same but like humans they do not, look at Oliver billed as the humanzee missing link and for years was deemed special, different, etc and of course the story was embellished like claiming he only had 47 chromosomes when modern DNA testing quickly proved he had 48 and was a simple chimpanzee albeit odd looking, photo opps ( staged) tried to present Oliver living as a playboy were part of the ruse.
To me the fact they didn't jump on DNA for this threads creature proves to me they know it's nothing, but as I say now prove me wrong.

Edited July 9 by the13bats

[psyche101]

13 hours ago, Piney said:

Thinking about it. 

Didn't we discuss the Bili once back in our Bigfoot hunting days? 

Sure did. Think it wasn't long after they gathered the scat sample that identified it as chimp. 

[psyche101]

12 hours ago, Abramelin said:

It's a Bili or Bondo Ape. And it's a normal chimp, just larger. It's genetical exactly the same as a regular chimp.

Another hypothesis is a "lost ape". No apes live in the region so it has been proposed a gorilla hunting for food or cast into isolation is possible.

[the13bats]

3 minutes ago, psyche101 said:

Another hypothesis is a "lost ape". No apes live in the region so it has been proposed a gorilla hunting for food or cast into isolation is possible.

It would need a breeding pop

[psyche101]

1 hour ago, Guyver said:

This is very interesting.  So, chimps and gorillas can’t breed, so…chimporilla is out….but, if you look at it while hanging in the tree, you can see it’s quite a robust specimen and it does look like a cross between a gorilla and a chimp.  It looks more gorilla like than chimp to me, so yes….this is fascinating.

I thought it looked pretty large too. As hammer pointed out though it's easy to underestimate the size of chimps.

[psyche101]

2 minutes ago, the13bats said:

It would need a breeding pop

That's where the Koolokamba comes into the thread. Like the Bili ape, there could be a sub species. 

[Abramelin]

3 hours ago, psyche101 said:

Another hypothesis is a "lost ape". No apes live in the region so it has been proposed a gorilla hunting for food or cast into isolation is possible.

These chimps are larger than the avarage chimp. Some were 6 feet tall.

 

We Dutch are the largest humans - on avarage- on this planet.

Personally I don't feel I belong to a different species of humans...

🙂

[Abramelin]

https://karlshuker.blogspot.com/2013/02/the-bili-bondo-apes-unmasking-congos.html?m=1

[Piney]

21 hours ago, Hammerclaw said:

The last of the Mangani.

Korak is not happy. 

[+Hammerclaw]

47 minutes ago, Piney said:

Korak is not happy. 

"Kreegah! "Korak bundolo!"

[Piney]

42 minutes ago, Hammerclaw said:

"Kreegah! "Korak bundolo!"

I haven't read Burroughs since the 90s so I don't speak Mangani anymore. 😆

[+Hammerclaw]

39 minutes ago, Piney said:

I haven't read Burroughs since the 90s so I don't speak Mangani anymore. 😆

I remember from the '60s. I still have all the Ace and Ballentine paperbacks. These robust chimps fit the bill. I think when us fire-apes evolved, the rest of the apes devolved back into the trees.

Edited July 10 by Hammerclaw

[Piney]

7 minutes ago, Hammerclaw said:

I remember from the '60s. I still have all the Ace and Ballentine paperbacks. These robust chimps fit the bill. I think when us fire-apes evolved, the rest of the apes devolved back into the trees.

I had the Balletine set from a mall Walden Books.

Remember when they had the whole section of Sci-fi and fantasy paper backs?  

[+Hammerclaw]

28 minutes ago, Piney said:

I had the Balletine set from a mall Walden Books.

Remember when they had the whole section of Sci-fi and fantasy paper backs?  

Those were the days. Remember the yellow spine DAW SF?

[Piney]

1 minute ago, Hammerclaw said:

Those were the days. Remember the yellow spine DAW SF?

Vaguely. 

[+Hammerclaw]

1 minute ago, Piney said:

Vaguely. 

They stole Ace's thunder. They carried on my favorite Ace series, the saga of Earl Dumarest of Terra, by E,C, Tubb.

[Abramelin]

12 hours ago, Abramelin said:

These chimps are larger than the avarage chimp. Some were 6 feet tall.

 

We Dutch are the largest humans - on avarage- on this planet.

Personally I don't feel I belong to a different species of humans...

🙂

I remember I once posted a video about captured Bili/Bondo apes in some zoo.

Can't find it anymore, but the video showed they looked and behaved like regular chimps, just larger.

They even looked so similar to regular chimps that I thought the video was fake.

But then a caretaker pressed himself against the bars of the cage those apes were behind. He was of the same size as these 'lion killers'.

 

[Antigonos]

5 hours ago, Piney said:

I had the Balletine set from a mall Walden Books.

Remember when they had the whole section of Sci-fi and fantasy paper backs?  

I really miss those days man. Mall bookstores were my first, and to this day the best except for a few in NYC.  When the superstores came along in the 90s they put the small mall stores out of business.
B.Dalton, Barnes and Noble, Waldenbooks, Doubleday. And for their size they were packed full, with every section you could think of.  I got lucky, my brother had all the Ace and Del Rey editions and I held onto them after he moved out.

[Piney]

6 minutes ago, Antigonos said:

I really miss those days man. Mall bookstores were my first, and to this day the best except for a few in NYC.  When the superstores came along in the 90s they put the small mall stores out of business.
B.Dalton, Barnes and Noble, Waldenbooks, Doubleday. And for their size they were packed full, with every section you could think of.  I got lucky, my brother had all the Ace and Del Rey editions and I held onto them after he moved out.

  There was a awesome used bookstore in Mullica Hill that I would ride my bike to on Sundays after Meeting and was coming home with 5 or 6 books every Sunday on history or Native Americans. When the owner's husband died she sold me his entire NA library for next to nothing.

 Since we're a little main street shopping town we have a small bookstore called Words Matter and that's the only one I dealt with since moving here. Ask and she finds. 

But I do deal with a online bookstore for my Bibliobazaar and Scholar Select reprints for "beating on" and loaning out. 

[Abramelin]

39 minutes ago, Abramelin said:

I remember I once posted a video about captured Bili/Bondo apes in some zoo.

Can't find it anymore, but the video showed they looked and behaved like regular chimps, just larger.

They even looked so similar to regular chimps that I thought the video was fake.

But then a caretaker pressed himself against the bars of the cage those apes were behind. He was of the same size as these 'lion killers'.

 

Can't find that goddamn video.

But this is a nice link:

https://www.iflscience.com/bondo-ape-the-truth-behind-brutal-lion-eating-chimps-of-the-congo-67487