Congo's mystery killer could be a new type of ape
By David Derbyshire, Science Correspondent
(Filed: 07/10/2004)
An elusive new species of great ape, known to locals as the "lion killer", may have been discovered in remote forests of the Congo.
The creatures are far larger and more aggressive than normal chimpanzees and have provoked much debate among experts. Some believe that the lion killers are a previously unknown species and should join the other great apes: the chimp, bonobo, gorilla and orang utan.
But others say they are unusually aggressive chimps with odd gorilla-like characteristics.
Legends of lost apes of the Congo basin go back more than a century and inspired the 1980 novel Congo by Michael Crichton. In the 1990s, Karl Ammann, a Swiss photographer, travelled to the Democratic Republic of Congo to track them.
Locals told him about giant apes with a reputation for killing lions, New Scientist magazine reports today. Their ridged skulls were typical of gorillas but they behaved like chimps, and unlike either they made permanent nests.
Last year Shelly Williams, an independent primatologist affiliated to the Jane Goodall Institute in Maryland, in the United States, became the first scientist to see the creatures close up and is sure that they are a new species.
