An extinct gibbon was found buried in an ancient tomb. Did humans kill them off?

Inside a desk drawer at a Chinese museum, a British paleontologist came across the face and jaw bones of a long-dead gibbon in 2009.

Five years earlier, scientists had discovered the bones inside an elaborate 2,200-year-old tomb belonging to a woman of Chinese royalty. It’s not unusual to find the bones of bears, leopards, and gibbons in these imperial burials, but there is something curious about these particular gibbon bones.

“The specimen remains are not just a unique species, but a new genus,” James Hansford, a researcher at the Zoological Society of London, said in an interview. Hansford is the co-author of a new study in the journal Science detailing the gibbon finding. Read more…

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Source: Mashable | An extinct gibbon was found buried in an ancient tomb. Did humans kill them off?