David Attenborough's Natural History Museum Alive Page #4

A yeti - an abominable snowman.

Well, there is one small,

insignificant-looking specimen

in the storage vaults down here

that could, perhaps,

explain those prints.

It was found in a shop in Hong Kong

that sold Chinese

traditional medicines.

It was the molar tooth

of some kind of ape-like creature,

except that it was huge.

The museum has only got a fragment,

this is it.

But here's a cast of a complete one

and it's six times

the size of one of ours.

It was given the name

Gigantopithecus -

"giant ape."

After that discovery, one or two

more teeth were discovered,

but nothing much, until eventually,

a piece of the lower jaw was found.

The original is now in America,

this is a cast,

but here is the lower jaw.

If this animal had a skull

the same proportions

as those of a gorilla,

its complete skull

would've been this big.

This was a true monster.

So we know a huge ape did exist,

Gigantopithecus.

It could well have stood 3m tall,

in which case,

it would've been eight times

as heavy as I am.

And if you're as heavy as that,

you don't spend much time

climbing in trees

because they won't support you.

So the likelihood is that his arms

are quite short

and he walked upright.

He was bipedal.

I'll get out of the way.

An upright animal has its head

on the top of its spine, as I do.

And if that head

is to be well-balanced,

it's better not to have

a long muzzle,

but a rather flat face.

So if I were to observe

Gigantopithecus

and it stared back at me,

I suspect I'd find its look

rather unnervingly familiar.

Gigantopithecus is commonly

thought to have died out

several hundred thousand years ago.

But sightings of the yeti

continue to be reported,

so is it possible

that some kind of giant ape,

maybe even Gigantopithecus itself,

still survives somewhere out in

those remote Himalayan mountains?

The Gigantopithecus tooth

isn't the only intriguing specimen

down here in the storerooms.

This - a piece of dung.

Looking at it, you might think

it had dropped to the ground

only yesterday.

'It was found in a cave

in Patagonia.'

And with it, a piece of skin,

like this -

covered in a very coarse,

bristly hair

and on the underside,

mysterious white bone nodules,

as though it was a kind of armour.

No known creature alive today

has armoured hide like this.

If it still survived, it would be

a truly extraordinary discovery,

so at the end of the 19th century,

explorers and scientists

started a search for it.

In fact, the dung and the fur

appeared to be recent

only because they had been,

in effect, freeze-dried

in that ancient cave.

The creatures themselves

had died out some 10,000 years ago.

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