Interestingly, this task has so far been solved successfully and without previous training only by apes (Call 2004; Hill et al. 2011) and Grey parrots (Schloegl et al. 2012), whereas all monkeys failed (Heimbauer et al. 2012; Paukner et al. 2009; Schmitt and Fischer 2009) or needed extensive training (Sabbatini and Visalberghi 2008).
Madelene finds the ape, called Erasmus, in a cage on her husband's property.
Jon Downes, of the British-based Centre for Fortean Zoology, said he believed the creatures might be the last remnants of a giant ape called gigantopithecus, believed to have died out 300,000 years ago.
The two on offer at BlizzCon were a giant ape called Winston who can activate a rage attack and a robot called Rheinhardt, who was armed with a shield and a massive hammer.
Among Mr. Tavel's other well-known plays (he eventually wrote 41) was "Gorilla Queen," a takeoff of the jungle movies of the '40s in which a tribe of gibbons worships an effeminate giant ape called Queen Kong.
He got hooked on Donkey Kong after seeing "The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters," the popular 2007 documentary about competitive practitioners of this classic arcade game, which pits a large ape called Donkey Kong against Mario, Nintendo's famous Italian-American plumber-hero.
And many researchers have thought that a large-bodied, 18-million-year-old ape called Proconsul from Kenya offered the best model for the ancestor of all apes.
But Northern Illinois University anthropologist Daniel Gebo and colleagues propose in Science that a larger, tree-dwelling ape called Morotopithecus is an even older ancestor.
It has been reported that many species choose the "bail out" key in such a way as to maximize rewards, including dolphins (Smithe et al. 1995), rhesus monkeys (Hampton 2001), great apes (Call & Carpenter 2001), and human infants (Call & Carpenter 2001).
According to the dominant theory for the origin of gestural communication in great apes (Call and Tomasello 2007a, p. 216), the repertoire of an ape can be divided into two parts.
