That’s because volume not only takes height into account, but width and surface area. Doubling from one meter to two meters, in other words, doesn’t mean a doubling in the volume - it means the two-meter individual is eight times the volume of the one-meter individual. With every meter in height, Bocherens says, we should expect about eight times the volume. “That’s totally unrealistic!” Bocherens scoffs, with a chuckle. For that, we have Gigantopithecus’s jaw remnants to thank - and the rigid rules of biophysics.īocherens breaks it down, working with the assumption that the giant ape that terrorizes Tom Hiddleston and company in Skull Island hovers around 30 meters (about 98.5 feet) high. But what we do know is that there is no way King Kong could exist in real life. Was it a bipedal or a quadripedal? Was it robust like modern day gorillas, with a wide chest and beefy upper body supported by thick, muscular legs? Or was it wiry and slender, more akin to a lanky man? Was it violent, combative, thrashing? Or was it a gentle giant, ambling about like a panda, unsure of how to live within its expansive presence? For his part, Bocherens harbors a guess that its sheer size and weight make it more likely it walked on all fours, but he can’t discount bipedalism, especially given how easily primates transition between walking and crawling. It was powerful.Īnd that’s about all we know about Gigantopithecus. The southeast Asian orangutan ancestor was huge - more than twice the size of an NFL defensive lineman, both in height and weight. We know frustratingly little about Gigantopithecus, however: The only fossils that have ever been found are those of a fragmented lower jaw with “reduced front teeth and enlarged molars and pre-molars,” according to a December 2015 paper published in the journal Quarternary International. So yeah, it wasn’t large enough to scale the Empire State Building, but “it’s the largest ape we know of,” Bocherens tells Inverse via Skype, from a room crammed with various books and reference guides, his glasses sliding down his nose every so often as he squints at the screen. Bocherens is an expert in the beast closest to being the real-life version of King Kong, a three-meter (9.84 feet) tall ape appropriately dubbed Gigantopithecus blacki. One hundred thousand years ago, one did, says Herve Bocherens, a paleobiologist teaching at Universität Tübingen in Germany. The latest reincarnation of King Kong, Kong: Skull Island, hit theaters on Friday with a familiar storyline: A gigantic ape wreaks havoc, humans try to take the monster down, and when they succeed, the world is restored back to order.īut could an extraordinarily huge ape ever truly exist?
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