Nowadays, King Kong is a cash cow that a Hollywood movie studio rolls out every so often to sell tickets.

Hundreds of thousands of years ago, though, Gigantopithecus blacki roamed the forests of Southeast Asia, standing more than three metres tall and estimated to weigh around 270 kilograms.

No word on whether Gigantopithecus had a penchant for rescuing blonde maidens in distress.

Here’s Live Science:

Scientists are now developing a clearer picture of the giant animal’s place on the primate family tree, after conducting groundbreaking analysis of proteins in tooth enamel dating to nearly 2 million years ago.

…as massive as Gigantopithecus was in life, fossils of the hefty primate have been few and hard to find — thousands of teeth and four partial jaws — leaving many questions about the extinct ape’s evolutionary lineage and appearance..

Ikumi Kayama (Studio Kayama LLC)

Genetic analysis of fossils can provide important clues about long-extinct animals, but in very old fossils from warm, humid geographic regions, the DNA is usually too degraded to be of much use…However, the study authors had recently devised a new method for recovering and reconstructing protein sequences…

They found that the extinct “Bigfoot” isn’t a close human relative, like chimpanzees and bonobos. Rather, the sequences that most resembled Gigantopithecus proteins belonged to modern orangutans, and the giant ape’s lineage is thought to have split from its cousin’s around 12 million to 10 million years ago, the scientists wrote in the study.

The giant ape was first named in 1935 when a scientist came across teeth being sold in a drugstore in China as ‘dragon’s teeth’.

In 2016, The Jungle Book remake featured the species as the inspiration for King Louie, and Gigantopithecus is often dubbed the ‘real King Kong’, with some saying it formed the basis for the movies of the same name.

Using the new methods used to obtain molecular evidence from old fossils could well lead to further information being gathered about humankind’s ancient ancestors, shedding more light on our evolution process.

[sources:livescience&sciencemag]