How One Book in 1861 Turned the Gorilla Into a Monster

💰 Support the channel: USDT TRC20: TBebXWjFeAJHfArVsJvt8N6Yv5rvn4GXP7 In 1861 a young explorer published a book describing a creature that stood up in the forest, roared, drummed on its own chest and charged him. He called it a hellish dream creature, half man and half beast, and that single description built the monster we spent the next century believing in. Here is what he was actually looking at: a warning. Everything in a gorilla display exists so that a fight never happens, and a 2021 study proved the chest beat carries the animal's real size, because larger males produce lower frequencies and the signal cannot be faked. In this video: what a silverback actually is, the sagittal crest and the fermentation gut behind 400 pounds of muscle built on leaves, the nine parts of the display in order, how Hanno, Savage, Du Chaillu and King Kong made the monster, the females who choose their own male, why mountain gorillas went from about 240 animals in the early 1980s to 1063 today, how a human cold became their second biggest killer, and why heart disease takes 41% of adult male gorillas in North American zoos. 👍 Subscribe for new wildlife documentaries every week. #gorilla #silverback #mountaingorilla #wildlife #wildlifedocumentary #animalfacts #greatapes #primates #naturedocumentary #africanwildlife #animalbehavior #conservation #rwanda #virunga #natureeducation