There’s a lot we don’t know about gorillas. This is due to the lack of legal dead gorillas to dissect. And that means many details of our shared family tree remain unclear. For instance, we used to believe that if you look at all the primates, you’d see a gradual increase in the complexity of the lower facial muscles — important in human speech and facial expressions — as you moved from primates that are closer to our common ancestors, like the loris, say, to the Great Apes and humans.
But scientists haven’t had much of a chance to see for themselves where gorillas actually fit in this supposed spectrum. Now science — and a gorilla named Lia — may be shedding light on a question that’s more complex than it sounds.
It’s for good reasons, ethically and conservation-wise, that it’s so rare for anatomists to have a dead gorilla you can legally dissect. Despite this essential restriction, it does unfortunately slow the progress of scientific understanding. As anatomist Anne Burrows, at Duquesne University, puts it in relation to all primates, “It’s not like you can go to the grocery store and pluck a head off the shelf. They are very rare and difficult to come by.”
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So an anatomy lab came up with a plan and reached out to several zoos. Fast forward: Lia the Gorilla lived a good life in a zoo before dying of a heart attack, at which point the zoo contacted the researchers. As a result, anatomists Assaf Marom and Liat Rotenstreich, at the Israel Institute of Technology, were able to fill in some gaps in our knowledge of the evolution of orofascial (lower facial) muscles in primates. Other body parts went to scientists at a different institution so as to make maximal use of this rare donation. The results were published in The FASEB Journal in 2023.
Lia the Gorilla (Photo courtesy of Tibor Jäger)
“One of the most important things we told ourselves that we have to do is to dissect the facial muscles, because in the literature there is hardly any information on facial architecture in gorillas,” Dr. Marom, also a medical doctor, told Salon in a video interview, explaining that they had to go back to the 19th century to find previous work on the subject.
"In the literature........