ABOVE: Skull of Junzi imperialis, a newly described extinct gibbon from China
A skull extracted from a 2,200-year-old tomb in China represents a newly identified—and already extinct—gibbon, Junzi imperialis, paleontologists report today (June 21) in Science. Its human companion in the crypt is thought to be Lady Xia, the grandmother of China’s first emperor Qin Shihuang.
“I don’t doubt for a second that it’s a new species, and probably a new genus,” Thomas Geissmann, a gibbon expert at the University of Zurich who was not involved in the study, tells Science. “We can assume that this vast area of central China [once] had many other species.”
Lady Xia’s tomb, discovered in 2004, held a menagerie of remains—leopard, lynx, black bear, crane, and other animals that were buried with her. Several years ago, Samuel Turvey of the Zoological Society of London was visiting Shaanxi Provincial Institute of Archaeology in China when ...
