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The word gorilla comes from the history of Hanno the Navigator (c. 500 BC), a Carthaginian explorer on an expedition to the west African coast to the area that later became Sierra Leone. [1] [2] Members of the expedition encountered "savage people, the greater part of whom were women, whose bodies were hairy, and whom our interpreters called ...
The western gorilla (Gorilla gorilla) is a great ape found in Africa, one of two species of the hominid genus Gorilla. Large and robust with males weighing around 168 kilograms (370 lb), the species is found in a region of midwest Africa, geographically isolated from the eastern gorilla (Gorilla beringei). The hair of the western species is ...
The Hominidae (/ h ɒ ˈ m ɪ n ɪ d iː /), whose members are known as the great apes [note 1] or hominids (/ ˈ h ɒ m ɪ n ɪ d z /), are a taxonomic family of primates that includes eight extant species in four genera: Pongo (the Bornean, Sumatran and Tapanuli orangutan); Gorilla (the eastern and western gorilla); Pan (the chimpanzee and the bonobo); and Homo, of which only modern humans ...
Extant primates exhibit a broad range of variation in sexual size dimorphism (SSD), or sexual divergence in body size. [4] It ranges from species such as gibbons and strepsirrhines (including Madagascar's lemurs) in which males and females have almost the same body sizes to species such as chimpanzees and bonobos in which males' body sizes are larger than females' body sizes.
It has a jet black coat like the mountain gorilla (Gorilla beringei beringei), although the hair is shorter on the head and body. The male's coat, like that of other gorillas, greys as the animal matures, resulting in the designation "silverback". There are far fewer eastern lowland gorillas compared to western lowland gorillas.
A gorilla's forearm and wrist bones lock together to be able to sustain the weight of the animal and create a strong supporting structure. [14] Gorillas use this form of walking because their hips are attached differently from humans, so standing on two legs for a long period of time would eventually become painful.
English: Comparison of the size of a human (on the right) and two western gorillas (Gorilla gorilla) (left and middle). The human has an assumed height of 175 cm (5 ft 9 in), while the standing gorilla is 160 cm (5 ft 3 in). The gorilla on the left 120 cm (3 ft 11 in) is in a normal posture with knuckles on the ground.
The genus Gorilla is divided into two species: the eastern gorilla and the western gorilla, and either four or five subspecies. The DNA of gorillas is highly similar to that of humans, from 95 to 99% depending on what is included, and they are the next closest living relatives to humans after chimpanzees and bonobos.