An extinct gibbon was found buried in an ancient tomb. Did humans kill them off?

Inside a desk drawer at a Chinese museum, a British paleontologist came across the face and jaw bones of a long-dead gibbon in 2009.

Five years earlier, scientists had discovered the bones inside an elaborate 2,200-year-old tomb belonging to a woman of Chinese royalty. It's not unusual to find the bones of bears, leopards, and gibbons in these imperial burials, but there is something curious about these particular gibbon bones.

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"The specimen remains are not just a unique species, but a new genus," James Hansford, a researcher at the Zoological Society of London, said in an interview. Hansford is the co-author of a new study in the journal Science detailing the gibbon finding. Read more...

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