Gorillas are mysterious creatures - so mysterious that people still aren't sure even how many types of gorilla there are. What's certain is that there are only about 620 mountain gorillas in the whole world (though there are 100,000 western lowland gorillas).
Every single mountain gorilla anywhere lives in the wild, so very few people have ever seen one.
Gorillas are big. Really big. They can weigh as much as 420 lbs (over 190kg), which isn't surprising as they sometimes eat 50 lbs of food a day (that's the same as twenty five large loaves of bread; or, actually, more like fifty large tins of bamboo shoots, which mountain gorillas adore. If you're a lowland gorilla, though, quite a few of those tins would contain termites. Yum.).
Gorillas have their own unique fingerprints, just like us; are a bit short-sighted, just like quite a lot of us; and burp when they're happy - and, hey, I've known people like that, too.
Gorillas live in troops, generally peacefully, unless some human idiot comes along and decides to cut down the bit of forest they live in.
Enjoy them while you can.
Word To Use Today: gorilla. This word comes from gorillai, which was first used by the Ancient Greek Hanno the Navigator to describe a tribe of hairy women he claimed to have seen in Sierra Leone.
This does raise the suspicion that the Navigator thing was just a scam to get himself bought drinks when he was down the pub.
How do the gorillas open the tins?
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