{"id":84,"date":"2008-05-09T09:59:27","date_gmt":"2008-05-09T14:59:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/elegans.uky.edu\/blog\/?p=84"},"modified":"2008-05-09T09:59:27","modified_gmt":"2008-05-09T14:59:27","slug":"the-late-discovery-of-the-gorilla","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimlund.org\/blog\/?p=84","title":{"rendered":"The Late Discovery of the Gorilla"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I read today that gorillas weren&#8217;t known to people in the West until 1847 when Thomas Staughton Savage described the gorilla from skeletons he obtained.  And it wasn&#8217;t until later, in 1861 that <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Paul_du_Chaillu\">Paul du Chaillu<\/a> sent back specimens to England, and the general public became aware of them.  <\/p>\n<p>I hadn&#8217;t realized that gorillas were discovered in the West so recently.  So many fundamental, basic things about the world were first understood in the 1800s.  Scientifically it was a time of much greater change than any time before or since.<\/p>\n<p>Chimpanzees and orangutans were sent to Europe in the 17th century.  It sounds crazy, but the relationship of humans\/chimps\/gorillas (human-chimp closest, gorillas more distantly related) wasn&#8217;t definitively established until molecular biology techniques were applied in the 1970s!  I wonder what Africans thought about chimps and gorillas, and their relationship?  I think their ranges overlap in West Africa.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I read today that gorillas weren&#8217;t known to people in the West until 1847 when Thomas Staughton Savage described the gorilla from skeletons he obtained. And it wasn&#8217;t until later, in 1861 that Paul du Chaillu sent back specimens to England, and the general public became aware of them. I hadn&#8217;t realized that gorillas were [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-84","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sci-general","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimlund.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimlund.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimlund.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimlund.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimlund.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=84"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jimlund.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimlund.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=84"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimlund.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=84"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimlund.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=84"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}