A fictitious, large, New World ape. The discovery of the previously unknown mountain gorilla in 1903 set the stage for the acceptance of reports by oil geologist Franqois de Loys in 1920 that he had discovered an ape in the hinterlands of Venezuela. The importance of the discovery was underscored by the fact that no apes (as opposed to monkeys) were known to exist in the Americas.
According to de Loys’s story, he and his associates encountered the apes while exploring for oil. The apes were angry at the human intrusion into their territory and began to show their hostility by making loud noises and throwing tree branches and feces at them. When two apes appeared to approach the geological party in an attack mode, de Loys shot one of them and drove the other away. The dead ape was a female, almost 5 feet tall, and covered with reddish hair. The native member of the expedition claimed no knowledge of the creature. Because he had no means of preserving the body, de Loys propped it up and took a photograph. He said he had attempted to preserve the hide and the head but had lost them before returning to civilization. Only the photograph survived. The photo was presented to anthropologist Georges Mon- tandon, who dubbed it a new species, Ameranthropides loysi. De Loys wrote an article for the Illustrated London News hailing his discovery as filling in a gap in the evolutionary record.