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Japanese zookeepers believe they have solved the mystery of how a gibbon became pregnant despite living alone in her cage. Momo, a 12-year-old white-handed gibbon, shocked her keepers at the Kujukushima Zoo and Botanical Garden in Nagasaki in February 2021 when she gave birth despite having no known male companionship. Now two years later, following a DNA test on her baby, the zoo has worked out who the father is – and even has a theory about how the gibbons mated. The test showed the father to be Itō, a 34-year-old agile gibbon, who was in an adjacent enclosure to...

Feb. 3 (UPI) -- A Japanese zoo said it has solved the mystery of a gibbon became pregnant while living in isolation -- and a tiny hole in a board is to blame. Zookeepers at Kujukushima Zoo and Botanical Garden Mori Kirara in Sasebo City, Nagasaki Prefecture, said they were surprised when a lar gibbon named Momo gave birth in February 2021, as the ape had been living in her own enclosure without any males present. Officials said Momo was protective of her offspring, so it was nearly two years before they were able to collect enough stool and excrement...

An entirely new species of ape has been discovered buried in an ancient tomb in central China. The remains of the now-extinct gibbon, which researchers have named Junzi imperialis, were found in a burial chamber in Shaanxi Province that dates back around 2,300 years. Researchers believe it may be the first ape species to have perished as a direct result of human activities such as hunting. “All of the world’s apes - chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans and gibbons - are threatened with extinction today due to human activities, but no ape species were thought to have become extinct as a result...

Rome — I am sitting on the steps of the Capitoline Hill, as close as I can approximate the spot where, exactly 250 years ago today, on October 15, 1764, the 27-year old Edward Gibbon was struck by the muses, leading to perhaps the greatest work of historical scholarship in the English language. Though the anecdote in his biography recalling the moment has been called into question, it is both sufficiently famous and sufficiently inspiring to anyone with a historical bent to warrant retelling. Gibbon’s recollects the moment: It was at Rome, on the fifteenth of October, 1764, as...

--snip-- But the attention of the emperor [Valens] was most seriously engaged, by the important intelligence which he received from the civil and military officers who were intrusted with the defence of the Danube. He was informed, that the North was agitated by a furious tempest; that the irruption of the Huns, an unknown and monstrous race of savages, had subverted the power of the Goths; and that the suppliant multitudes of that warlike nation, whose pride was now humbled in the dust, covered a space of many miles along the banks of the river. With outstretched arms, and pathetic...

Since Romulus, with a small band of shepherds and outlaws, fortified himself on the hills near the Tyber, ten centuries had already elapsed. During the four first ages, the Romans, in the laborious school of poverty, had acquired the virtues of war and government: by the vigorous exertion of those virtues, and by the assistance of fortune, they had obtained, in the course of the three succeeding centuries, an absolute empire over many countries of Europe, Asia, and Africa. The last three hundred years had been consumed in apparent prosperity and internal decline. The nation of soldiers, magistrates, and legislators,...

A people elated by pride, or soured by discontent, are seldom qualified to form a just estimate of their actual situation. The subjects of Constantine were incapable of discerning the decline of genius and manly virtue, which so far degraded them below the dignity of their ancestors; but they could feel and lament the rage of tyranny, the relaxation of discipline, and the increase of taxes. The impartial historian,who acknowledges the justice of their complaints, will observe some favorable circumstances which tended to alleviate the misery of their condition. The threatening tempest of Barbarians, which so soon subverted the foundations...

Two animal conservationists have got married in a gibbon-style wedding ceremony in Thailand. Briton Sam Lake met Israeli Norka Russin while working as a volunteer for the Return Gibbons to the Forest project at Phuket. Mr Lake, 26, accompanied by a drum band and carrying trays of gifts, summoned his mate by imitating a male gibbon call. His 28-year-old bride Israel responded with happy monkey calls while swinging down from a treetop into his embrace, reports The Nation. After the wedding, at a wildlife sanctuary, the groom said: "Once the gibbon has chosen a mate it will not philander." The...