The biggest ape that ever lived

Giant apes that stood nearly 10 feet tall and weighed more than 600 pounds once roamed southern China. These creatures, which were the largest apes ever to walk the Earth, ate plants, fruits, and flowers before they went extinct. New research shows they vanished between 295,000 and 215,000 years ago due to a limited diet and an inability to evolve (change very slowly over time) as their habitat shifted. The apes, named Gigantopithecus blacki, lived for more than one million years in the Pleistocene epoch, which lasted from 2.58 million years ago to about 11,700 years ago. “Normally when you think about a giant, you think about a dinosaur, but this was a giant in the primate family,” Kira Westaway of Macquarie University in Australia, a co-author of the study,…

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The Week Junior US (Digital) - 1 Issue, Issue 200

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