![]() ![]() But by the early 2000s, Ammann was able to return with a growing number of scientists. Amman translated two of them to mean The ones which beat the tree! and The one which kills the lion.įor several years, civil war in the DRC made it impossible to mount a scientific expedition to follow up on Ammann's observations and evidence. ![]() In the local language, Zande, there were many names for these apes. Ammann also brought back legends from Congo locals, stories of aggressive mystery apes six feet tall, who walked erect and were immune to poison darts. Most impressively, he brought back a skull that appeared to be chimpanzee, but was larger and had a gorilla's sagittal crest. It slept on the ground, in defiance of the predators that drive ordinary chimps up into the trees, and did other things that were characteristic of gorillas, not of chimps. Determined to find these creatures, Ammann went there in 1996 and right away began to find evidence of a new type of mystery ape, one that looked most like a chimpanzee but was larger and grayer, and had habits that were like those of gorillas. In the mid-1990s, a Swiss author, bushmeat activist, and photographer named Karl Ammann saw mysterious skulls in a Belgian museum that appeared to be neither gorilla nor chimp, and that were said to have been collected from the Bili-Uéré region by early colonists in 1898. Half the region is north of the Uélé and consists of scattered jungle and savannah the other half is south of the river and is solid dense jungle. Sometimes it's called the Bongo Ape (Bili and Bongo are two towns in the region), but scientists today refer to the 55,000 square kilometers where this population is found as the Bili-Uéré region, named for Bili and the Uéré river, a tributary of the larger Uélé river. The range of the Bili ape is not formally established. About half the world's chimpanzees live in the DRC, so naturalists have always known - or at least assumed - that chimps would be found here as well. The Bili Forest lies in the northern part of the DRC (Democratic Republic of the Congo) in a land almost entirely undeveloped and dense with jungle. Today we're going to go there ourselves, and see if we can sort out what part of the Bili ape is legend, and what part of it has been confirmed by science. Cryptozoologists point to the Bili ape as proof that mysterious new species are out there for real, just waiting to be discovered. It is called the Bili ape, known from both eyewitness accounts and even directly evidenced with unusual skulls that cannot otherwise be classified. In the darkest jungles of the Congo is said to lurk a recently discovered great ape: large, upright, aggressive, and distinct from both chimpanzees and gorillas. ![]()
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