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[Carrie McLaren <carrie AT stayfreemagazine.org>]

Congo's mystery killer could be a new type of ape
By David Derbyshire, Science Correspondent
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/10/07/wchimp07.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/10/07/ixworld.html

An elusive new species of great ape, known to locals as the "lion 
killer", may have been discovered in remote forests of the Congo.

The creatures are far larger and more aggressive than normal 
chimpanzees and have provoked much debate among experts. Some believe 
that the lion killers are a previously unknown species and should 
join the other great apes: the chimp, bonobo, gorilla and orang utan.

But others say they are unusually aggressive chimps with odd 
gorilla-like characteristics.

Legends of lost apes of the Congo basin go back more than a century 
and inspired the 1980 novel Congo by Michael Crichton. In the 1990s, 
Karl Ammann, a Swiss photographer, travelled to the Democratic 
Republic of Congo to track them.

Locals told him about giant apes with a reputation for killing lions, 
New Scientist magazine reports today. Their ridged skulls were 
typical of gorillas but they behaved like chimps, and unlike either 
they made permanent nests.

Last year Shelly Williams, an independent primatologist affiliated to 
the Jane Goodall Institute in Maryland, in the United States, became 
the first scientist to see the creatures close up and is sure that 
they are a new species.

"We could hear them in the trees, about 20 feet away," she said. "My 
tracker made a sound of an injured duiker [antelope] and four came 
rushing through the brush towards me.

"If this had been a bluff charge, they would have been screaming to 
intimidate us. These guys were quiet. And they were huge. They were 
coming in for the kill. I was directly in front of them, and as soon 
as they saw my face, they stopped and disappeared."

However, Dr Colin Groves, of the Australian National University, 
Canberra, who has studied their skulls, said: "There is no doubt from 
the measurements that this is the skull of a chimp, although the 
crest is strange."

Dr Andrew Whitten, of St Andrews University, questioned whether 
behavioural differences were enough to suggest a new ape. "There are 
huge cultural differences among chimpanzees," he said.

"I do not think that behaviour makes a good marker for sub-species in 
great apes as flexible as chimps."