Scientists first learned of Gigantopithecus in 1935, when Ralph von Koenigswald, a German paleoanthropologist, walked into a pharmacy in Hong Kong and found an unusually large primate molar for sale.

Gigantopithecus blacki, which stood 10 feet tall and weighed up to 660 pounds, thrived in the forests of southern Asia until a little more than 200,000 years ago.

Gigantopithecus, they say, went extinct between 295,000 and 215,000 years ago. Those dates were much more recent than previous estimates and coincide with a dynamic period of environmental change.

No Gigantopithecus fossils from the neck down have ever been found and documented. Given that Gigantopithecus roamed parts of Asia for some 2 million years, Westaway said that was surprising.

Gigantopithecus, (Gigantopithecus blacki), genus of large extinct apes represented by a single species, Gigantopithecus blacki, which lived during the Pleistocene Epoch (2.6 million to 11,700 ...

Discover the fascinating world of primates in our latest video, "Top 9 Largest Primates: From Gray Langur to Gigantopithecus!

The biggest ape to ever walk the Earth, Gigantopithecus blacki, may have died out because of its big size and limited diet, new research suggests. When you purchase through links on our site, we ...

The world may not have had a King Kong as Hollywood imagined him to be, but the next best thing was a creature called Gigantopithecus that roamed 100,000 years ago.

Gigantopithecus, an enormous extinct ape that lived in Asia millions of years ago, was a close relative of the modern orangutan.

The largest ape on record stood nearly 10 feet tall. New research on cave fossils in southern China has shed light on the mysterious demise of Gigantopithecus.