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A new species of living great ape!
Topic Started: Nov 2 2017, 12:05 PM (1,147 Views)
Beetleboy
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No, this isn't a joke. This is real, a new species of great ape has just been discovered.
http://www.sci-news.com/biology/tapanuli-orangutan-pongo-tapanuliensis-05389.html

Darwin's beard, this is amazing! Unfortunately it is also the most endangered species of great ape, and is threatened by extinction due to plans to build a dam in the heart of its territory.
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Mao
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BeetleBoo
Nov 2 2017, 12:05 PM
No, this isn't a joke. This is real, a new species of great ape has just been discovered.
http://www.sci-news.com/biology/tapanuli-orangutan-pongo-tapanuliensis-05389.html

Darwin's beard, this is amazing! Unfortunately it is also the most endangered species of great ape, and is threatened by extinction due to plans to build a dam in the heart of its territory.
It just looks like a normal orangutan.
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Beetleboy
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Mao
Nov 2 2017, 12:11 PM
BeetleBoo
Nov 2 2017, 12:05 PM
No, this isn't a joke. This is real, a new species of great ape has just been discovered.
http://www.sci-news.com/biology/tapanuli-orangutan-pongo-tapanuliensis-05389.html

Darwin's beard, this is amazing! Unfortunately it is also the most endangered species of great ape, and is threatened by extinction due to plans to build a dam in the heart of its territory.
It just looks like a normal orangutan.
. . . so???
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Yiqi15
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I thought you meant extinct great ape. This is even more exciting then that. Hopefully the public will learn about this.

EDIT: the articles i've read about it suggest it differs via its teeth.

The Paper which described the orangutan
 
Pongo tapanuliensis differs from all extant orangutans in the breadth of the upper canine (21.5 versus <20.9 mm), the shallow face depth (6.0 versus >8.4 mm), the narrower interpterygoid distance (at posterior end of pterygoids 33.8 versus >43.9 mm; at anterior end of pterygoids, 33.7 versus >43.0 mm), the shorter tympanic tube (23.9 versus >28.4 mm, mostly >30 mm), the shorter temporomandibular joint (22.5 versus >24.7 mm), the narrower maxillary incisor row (28.3 versus >30.1 mm), the narrower distance across the palate at the first molars (62.7 versus >65.7 mm), the shorter horizontal length of the mandibular symphysis (49.3 versus >53.7 mm), the smaller inferior transverse torus (horizontal length from anterior surface of symphysis 31.8 compared to >36.0 mm), and the width of the ascending ramus of the mandible (55.9 versus >56.3 mm).


(Here is the link if you want to see it (http://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(17)31245-9?_returnURL=http%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0960982217312459%3Fshowall%3Dtrue))

Edited by Yiqi15, Nov 2 2017, 12:21 PM.
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Beetleboy
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neither lizard nor boy nor beetle . . . but a little of all three
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Yiqi15
Nov 2 2017, 12:18 PM
I thought you meant extinct great ape. This is even more exciting then that. Hopefully the public will learn about this.
I'll specify living in the title to avoid future confusion.
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LittleLazyLass
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Well, this is technically elevating a known population to species status, but cool nonetheless.
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Flisch
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LittleWitch
Nov 2 2017, 01:56 PM
Well, this is technically elevating a known population to species status, but cool nonetheless.
Ah, I was confused about this. The title made it sound as if these are newly discovered. *glares at beetle*
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lamna
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Interesting, but I hope this doesn't cause too much problem with captive conservation. We've spent the last few decades sorting out the Borneans from the Sumatrans, it would be a shame if any perfectly good Sumatran orangutans were now deemed worthless hybrids.
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Ebervalius
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lamna
Nov 2 2017, 03:22 PM
Interesting, but I hope this doesn't cause too much problem with captive conservation. We've spent the last few decades sorting out the Borneans from the Sumatrans, it would be a shame if any perfectly good Sumatran orangutans were now deemed worthless hybrids.
Wow, racist much? :P

Seriously though, these are good news. Great apes are always cool. It's a shame they're all severely endangered (other than fucking humans, of course).
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Sheather
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lamna
Nov 2 2017, 03:22 PM
Interesting, but I hope this doesn't cause too much problem with captive conservation. We've spent the last few decades sorting out the Borneans from the Sumatrans, it would be a shame if any perfectly good Sumatran orangutans were now deemed worthless hybrids.
I thought that too, fanatical subspecies splitting in captive breeding populations is something that bothers me a lot, I think it's largely unnecessary and that for many animals a large crossbred population is better than two smaller inbred pure ones.
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Sheather
Nov 2 2017, 05:29 PM
lamna
Nov 2 2017, 03:22 PM
Interesting, but I hope this doesn't cause too much problem with captive conservation. We've spent the last few decades sorting out the Borneans from the Sumatrans, it would be a shame if any perfectly good Sumatran orangutans were now deemed worthless hybrids.
I thought that too, fanatical subspecies splitting in captive breeding populations is something that bothers me a lot, I think it's largely unnecessary and that for many animals a large crossbred population is better than two smaller inbred pure ones.
It concerns me that our desire to conserve individual species rather than extend the gene pool and save the larger group as a whole is so strong that species splits occur like this. The fact that Borneans and Sumatrans produce viable, fertile hybrids should be enough to tell us that this level of crossbreeding is okay. But then I suppose there's the argument that these two orangutans are as molecularly different as lions and tigers (where the hybrid difference is far more notable) but I've always doubted these claims due to the fertility of the Orangutan hybrids.
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Sheather
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It's not like the two of them are dramatically behaviorally distinct like the lion and tiger.

"Zoomix" tigers and lions, that is subspecies hybrids (almost all captive lions out of Africa being zoomix), are usually said to have no conservation value too, which I think is bullocks. They're still lions.

Zoomix tigers are slightly different, but the fundamental distinctions between Bengal and Siberian tigers are small. They both develop thick fur in cold climates and don't develop them in hot ones, Siberians are merely a bit larger. Crossbred tigers are simply more generalist tigers, which could likely adapt, assuming they were able to be raised in situ and familiarized with native prey (an issue no matter what kind of tiger they would be, since captivity is not natural for any of them), to survive in either locale in the wild.

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lamna
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It's unfortunate people only seem to actually try to accept hybrids until you're literally down to very last individuals.
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Lowry
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From an evolutionary perspective the creation of more generalist hybrids is surely advantageous and if conservation is ensuring a species survives in order to continue to develop evolutionarily then surely hybrids are essentially us giving endangered fauna and flora an advantage they sometimes couldn't even recieve naturally.
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opeFool
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Why don't people like crossbreeds? They're still the same species of animal, no?
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