Episode 102: Three Mystery Apes
b'It\'s mystery ape time! Learn about de Loys\' ape and two other mystery apes this week!\\n\\nThe only photograph we have of de Loys\' ape:\\n\\n\\n\\nA white-fronted spider monkey:\\n\\n\\n\\nOliver the so-called "ape man":\\n\\n\\n\\nA better picture of Oliver late in his life:\\n\\n\\n\\nA Bili ape:\\n\\n\\n\\nA regular gorilla (top) and a regular chimp (bottom, hearing no evil) for comparison with the Bili ape and Oliver:\\n\\n\\n\\n\\n\\nShow transcript:\\n\\nWelcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I\\u2019m your host, Kate Shaw.\\n\\nI don\\u2019t know about you, but I\\u2019m in the mood for a mystery animal this week. So let\\u2019s really dig in to a topic I haven\\u2019t covered much before, mystery apes!\\n\\nA lot of people get apes and monkeys confused, but it\\u2019s actually easy to tell them apart. For one thing, there aren\\u2019t very many apes. Gorillas, chimpanzees, orangutans, and bonobos are called great apes, and gibbons and siamangs are called the lesser apes, mostly because they\\u2019re smaller.\\n\\nApes never have tails and are closely related to humans. Humans, in fact, are considered great apes, but it\\u2019s rude to say so. We like to think we\\u2019re special because we can make podcasts and bulldozers and delicious cakes. Monkeys usually have tails, although not always, and a monkey, unlike an ape, can\\u2019t stand fully upright and can\\u2019t straighten its elbow out so that its arm is flat.\\n\\nNow that we have a pretty good idea of what an ape is, let\\u2019s look at three mystery apes.\\n\\nWe\\u2019ll start with a big mystery from 1920, an ape supposedly killed in South America and subsequently dubbed de Loys\\u2019 ape. It\\u2019s not just one mystery, it\\u2019s several mysteries wrapped up together. And while the ape\\u2019s body has been lost, we still have a photograph.\\n\\nIn 1917, geologist Fran\\xe7ois de Loys led an expedition to Venezuela and Colombia to search for oil. It was a disaster of an expedition, since not only did they not find oil, almost everyone in the expedition died. According to de Loys, in 1920 what was left of the group was camped along the Tarra River on the border between Colombia and Venezuela when two large animals appeared. De Loys said he thought they were bears at first, then realized they were apes of some kind. They were large, had reddish hair and no tails, and walked upright. The apes became aggressive toward the humans and, fearing for their lives, the geologists shot at the apes. They killed one and wounded the other, which fled.\\n\\nThe dead ape looked like a spider monkey, which was fairly common in the area, but it was much larger and had no tail. There was no way for the expedition to keep the body, so they propped it up on a crate with a stick under its chin to keep it upright, then took pictures. Only one of those pictures survived, since de Loys said the others were lost when a boat capsized later in the expedition.\\n\\nBut after de Loys got home to Europe, he didn\\u2019t tell anyone about the ape. He said he forgot all about it until 1929 when the anthropologist George Montandon noticed the surviving photograph in de Loys\\u2019s papers. After that, De Loys wrote an article about the ape which was published in the Illustrated London News.\\n\\nIt was a sensational article, not meant to be scientific. Here\\u2019s an excerpt:\\n\\n\\u201cThe jungle swished open, and a huge, dark, hairy body appeared out of the undergrowth, standing up clumsily, shaking with rage, grunting and roaring and panting as he came out onto us at the edge of the clearing. The sight was terrifying\\u2026\\n\\n\\u201cThe beast jumped about in a frenzy, shrieking loudly and beating frantically his hairy chest with his own fists; then he wrenched off at one snap a limb of a tree and, wielding it as a man would a bludgeon, murderously made for me. I had to shoot.\\u201d\\n\\nMontandon was enthusiastic about the ape. He wrote three articles for scientific journals and proposed the name Ameranthropoides loysi for it. But scientists were skeptical. Who was this de Loys guy and did he have any proof that the ape wasn\\u2019t just a spider monkey?'