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422 Miscellaneous. because this name better expresses the characters common to all the species which would fall under it than either of the other two names. On a new Gorilla from Congo. By MM. Alltx and Bouviek. MM. Lucan and Petit have lately sent from Landana (Congo), as part of the results of their hunting on the banks of the Kouilo, near the village of King Mayema, the skeleton and skin of an adult female gorilla, which possesses peculiar interest, both from its own nature and because it serves to confirm the recent discovery of this anthropoid in the above region. Although Battell, about 200 years ago, noticed the presence of great apes, aj)parently gorillas, in Congo, and in 1851 Dr. Ford maintained that this animal was met with from the Camaroons to Angola, Geofiroy St.-Hilaire in 1858 regarded their existence as demonstrated only on the shores of the Gaboon and the banks of the Moundah or Danger River. Since that date the researches of Du Chaillu, Marche, and the Marquis of Compiegne have carried the habitat of this great ape further south, as far as the Femand-Vaz. In 1877 Dr. Falkenstein brought to Europe a young living gorilla, which he had purchased in the region of the Kouilo (4° 35' S. lat.) ; and one of the authors quite recently received the skin of a young female from the same locality. " At that time," they say, " we did not think of separating this species from the type ; and, indeed, its youth could not allow of its furnishing satisfactory characters for specific separation. This, however, is not the case with the adult specimen which forms the subject of the present communication. " This female, which is aged, is remarkable as being of smaller size than the Gorilla c/ina ; and its head is proportionallj^ still smaller. It also differs in numerous characters, which we purpose to give in detail in the ' Bulletin ' of the Zoological Society of France, and which consist principally in the depth of the temporal fossae, the narrowness of the cranium behind the orbital arches, the narrowness of the interorbital space, and a greater prominence of the keel which rises in the middle of this space, the length and flattening of the zygomatic arches, and also a very noticeable dimi-nution of the height of the spinous apophyses of the first cervical vertebrae. " Its coat, grey and brown on the body, black on the limbs, with red parts on the head and pubis, does not differ essentially from that which several authors have rather vaguely described, except by a very sharp separation on the flanks between the brown of the belly and the grey of the back, and by the red tint of the pubic regions ; but it presents this remarkable peculiarity — that the back is thickly covered with long hair, contrary to what is seen in the other gorillas, in which the skin of this region is denuded and simply covered with short and worn hairs.

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On a new gorilla from Congo

M M Allix and Bouvier
Annals And Magazine of Natural History (5) 1: 422-423 (1878)

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