Planet of the Ape

Our planet nowadays is a well-explored place, where major zoological discoveries are exceedingly rare. True, there are countless kinds of insects and other tiny fauna still undescribed and unnamed in the Amazon and elsewhere; but a new large-bodied animal, a new vertebrate, comes to light seldom. If a previously unknown species of monkey is found (as the lesula was, in the eastern Congo basin, in 2007), the revelation makes news, even if the creature doesn’t happen to have (as the lesula does) a very long nose, a blue tush and the wide, dreamy eyes of Gene Wilder. So it’s hard for us to imagine how sensibilities were affected, in Europe and America, just two and three centuries ago, by the discovery of certain prodigious, unexpected beasts.