Giant orangutans that once dwelled in mainland Southeast Asian forests belonged to a single species that gradually shrank in size over nearly 2 million years, a study suggests.
Today, orangutans are found only on the islands of Sumatra and Borneo. But their ancient, super-size kin roamed forests in what’s now southern China and northern Vietnam. Fragmentary Asian fossils of uncertain age have long indicated that these massive, now-extinct orangutans shrank over time. And biological anthropologist Terry Harrison of New York University suspected — based on a small number of fossils from widely different time periods — that the apes rapidly evolved from a larger-bodied species to a different, smaller-bodied
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