A 2,200-year-old Chinese tomb held a new gibbon species, now extinct
Researchers suspect that humans drove this previously unknown lineage to extinction
By Bruce Bower
A royal crypt from China’s past has issued a conservation alert for apes currently eking out an existence in East Asia.
The partial remains of a gibbon were discovered in 2004 in an excavation of a 2,200- to 2,300-year-old tomb in central China’s Shaanxi Province. Now, detailed comparisons of the animal’s face and teeth with those of living gibbons show that the buried ape is from a previously unknown and now-extinct genus and species, conservation biologist Samuel Turvey and colleagues report in the June 22 Science. His team named the creature Junzi imperialis.