Author: Natasha Frost / Source: Atlas Obscura
Some 2,300 years ago, a gibbon unlike any on Earth today was buried in a chamber in Shaanxi Province, in central China, alongside lynx, leopards, and a black bear. The tomb is believed to have belonged to Lady Xia, who was the grandmother of Qin Shi Huang, China’s first emperor.
For years, the gibbon escaped much scientific scrutiny, until a visiting conservationist and gibbon expert, Samuel Turvey, came across its skull in a local museum. It’s since been found to be an entirely new genus and species, the BBC reports, likely brought to extinction hundreds of years ago.Using digital scans, Turvey and his team compared the gibbon’s skull to the bones of hundreds of other animals in collections around the world. The scans confirmed that the animal was unlike any other. Compared to other gibbons, the…
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