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🦍Origins & evolution

Gorilla · The atlas type is the western gorilla -- a knuckle-walking ape whose Fossey-era mountain cousins and Koko lab fame split one public name.

The gorilla did not enter English as a finished emblem. Hunts, films, listings and field stations rewrote the animal on a dated clock.

This chapter keeps ten timeline points, five eras and three milestones so a later translation can hold the same years.

Where it began

Gorilla-Pan split ~8 MaCentral African forests

Timeline

1847Savage and Wyman

Western gorilla named for science from Gabon material.

1967Karisoke founded

Fossey mountain-gorilla camp -- the public origin, wrong species for this page type.

1971Koko project starts

Patterson and a western-lineage captive gorilla.

1977Digit killed

Poaching death that funded a mountain-gorilla NGO story.

1985Fossey murdered

Karisoke crime that sealed a myth.

1988Gorillas in the Mist

Film that fixed Fossey as the gorilla.

1990sMbeli Bai platform

Western gorilla field site that stayed a paper, not a biopic.

2002-07Ebola waves

Western subpopulations lost large fractions in outbreak years.

2018Koko dies

Obituaries treated a lab ape as a linguist colleague.

2018Mountain gorilla uplist talk

G. beringei beringei to EN -- a rebound that must not be copied onto G. gorilla.

The eras

Gorilla
Brocken Inaglory · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Wikimedia Commons
Named from Gabon

1847 type

The western animal entered Latin before the mountain one entered film.

1967-88

Fossey myth

A mountain camp and a movie stole the public name.

1971-2018

Koko years

A captive western-lineage ape became the language argument.

1990s-2007

Bai and Ebola

The real western field: clearings and outbreaks.

2018-

Two cards

Mountain EN rebound versus western CR -- a split the public still slurs.

Milestones

Karisoke

1967

The camp that made gorillas a biography -- of the wrong species for this type, still inescapable.

Ebola years

2000s

Disease as a CR mechanism, not only snares.

Koko obituaries

2018

Lab signs as a public science funeral.

Reading gorilla history beside the resilience score keeps a recovered stock from standing in for a threatened cousin.

Keep exploring

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