The word 'gorilla' comes from a Carthaginian voyage around 500 BC
A Carthaginian explorer named Hanno sailed down West Africa around 500 BC and met hairy beings his interpreters called Gorillae. Nobody knows whether they were apes, monkeys or people. More than two thousand years later, scientists borrowed the name for the largest living primate, an ape that even has its own fingerprints.
Gorillas are big, mostly plant-eating great apes of equatorial Africa's tropical forests. There are two species, eastern and western, divided by the Congo River and its tributaries, with four or five subspecies. Their DNA is 96 to 99 percent similar to ours, depending on what is counted, and only chimpanzees and bonobos are closer relatives. The line leading to gorillas split from the one leading to humans and chimpanzees about 7 million years ago. Eastern gorillas are darker, the mountain gorilla darkest and shaggiest of all.
Adult males, called silverbacks for the pale saddle of hair reaching their hips, weigh 136 to 227 kilograms and can stand up to 1.8 metres, with arm spans reaching 2.6 metres. Females are much smaller. Gorillas mostly knuckle-walk, but a 2018 study of 77 mountain gorillas in Bwindi found knuckles took their weight only 60 percent of the time; they also used fists, palms and the backs of their hands, a variety once thought unique to orangutans. Their blood does not fit the human ABO system at all.
Diet depends on altitude. Mountain gorillas, living in cloud forests on the Virunga volcanoes as high as 4,300 metres, eat mostly leaves, stems and shoots, food so plentiful they rarely travel more than 500 metres a day. Western lowland gorillas rely far more on fruit, which is scattered, so they walk about 1,105 metres daily over ranges up to 14 square kilometres, and they also eat termites and ants.
Around 316,000 western gorillas and 5,000 eastern gorillas are thought to survive, and the IUCN lists both species as Critically Endangered, though conservation has succeeded in places. Wild gorillas usually live 35 to 40 years. The first scientific description came only in 1847, when Thomas Savage and Jeffries Wyman named the western gorilla from Liberian specimens, reviving Hanno's ancient word.
Source: Gorilla
