Gigantopithecus blacki stood as much as three meters high, and weighed as much as 500 kilograms. When European scientists first came upon its teeth in a Chinese pharmacy in the 1930s, they were being sold as “dragons’ teeth.” 
 
 But the enormous apes – cousins of orangutans – died out because they were too big to live in a changing environment where they needed massive amounts of food, a team of German researchers conclude in the journal Quaternary International. 
 
 “Orangutans have a slow metabolism and are able to survive on limited food,” said Herve Bocherens, of the Senckenberg Center for Human Evolution and Paleoenvironment at the University of Tubingen. “Due to its size, Gigantopithecus presumably depended on a large amount of food. When during the Pleistocene era more and more forested areas turned into savanna landscapes, there was simply an insufficient food supply for the giant ape.” 
 
 The enormous animal was first identified in 1935, and immediately compared to “King Kong” – the fictional subject of the Hollywood blockbuster just two years earlier. 
 
 Debate has continued ever since as to whether the Gigantopithecus was a meat eater, or whether they subsisted on plants. 
 
 Bocherens and his team analyzed the few fossils available – hundreds of large teeth, and lower jawbones. The scientists picked apart the carbon isotopes in the tooth enamel – and found data that offered clues, even several million years later. 
 
 Read more: Primal Pugilism: Men’s Hands Evolved to Fistfight 
 
 “Our results indicate that the large primates only lived in the forest and obtained their food from this habitat,” said Bocherens. “Gigantopithecus was an exclusive vegetarian, but it did not specialize on bamboo.” 
 
 During the glacial periods of Southeast Asia, “drastic forest reduction” pinned in the giant. The limited forage space, and its massive appetite, apparently doomed the primate, they conclude. 
 
 “We were able to shed a little light on the obscure history of this primate,” added Bocherens. 
 
 Debate over the Gigantopithecus menu still remains, however. A Chinese team found in 2011 that the apes subsisted on bamboo – and a massive die-off in the plants also killed off the apes, in a way that panda populations are cut back by suffering bamboo crops. ||||| Gigantopithecus, which roamed the Earth 100,000 years ago, failed to adapt when climate change affected its favoured diet of fruit 
 
 Earth's largest ever ape died out because it refused to eat its greens – study 
 
 The largest ape to roam Earth died out 100,000 years ago because it failed to adapt to eating savannah grass after climate change affected its preferred diet of forest fruit. 
 
 Gigantopithecus – the closest nature ever came to producing a real King Kong – weighed five times as much as an adult man and probably stood 3m (9ft) tall, according to rough estimates. 
 
 Fossil of dog-sized horned dinosaur shows east-west divide in America Read more 
 
 In its heyday a million years ago, it inhabited semi-tropical forests in southern China and mainland south-east Asia. 
 
 Until now, though, almost nothing was known about the giant’s anatomical shape or habits. 
 
 The only fossil records are four partial lower jaws, and perhaps a thousand teeth – the first of which turned up in the 1930s in Hong Kong apothecaries, where they were sold as “dragon’s teeth”. 
 
 These meagre remains “are clearly insufficient to say if the animal was bipedal or quadrupedal, and what would be its body proportions”, Herve Bocherens, a researcher at Tübingen University in Germany, said. 
 
 Its closest modern cousin is the orangutan, but whether Gigantopithecus had the same golden-red hue, or was black like a gorilla, is unknown. 
 
 Examining slight variations in carbon isotopes found in tooth enamel, Bocherens and an international team of scientists showed that the primordial King Kong lived only in the forest, was a strict vegetarian and probably wasn’t crazy about bamboo. 
 
 Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Gigantopithecus, a giant gorilla that looks like King Kong, disappeared 100,000 years ago from the surface of the Earth due to the inability to adapt to environmental changes, according to scientists. Photograph: H. Bocherens/AFP/Getty Images 
 
 These narrow preferences did not pose a problem for Gigantopithecus until Earth was struck by a massive ice age during the Pleistocene epoch, which stretched from about 2.6m to 12,000 years ago. 
 
 That’s when nature, evolution – and perhaps a refusal to try new foods – conspired to doom the giant ape, Bocherens said. 
 
 “Due to its size, Gigantopithecus presumably depended on a large amount of food,” he said. 
 
 “When during the Pleistocene, more and more forested area turned into savannah landscapes, there was simply an insufficient food supply.” 
 
 And yet, according to the study, other apes and early humans in Africa that had comparable dental gear were able to survive similar transitions by eating the leaves, grass and roots offered by their new environments. 
 
 But for some reason, Asia’s giant ape – which was probably too heavy to climb trees, or swing in their branches – did not make the switch. 
 
 “Gigantopithecus probably did not have the same ecological flexibility and possibly lacked the physiological ability to resist stress and food shortage,” notes the study, which is to be published in a specialist journal, Quaternary International. 
 
 Whether the mega-ape could have adapted to a changing world but didn’t, or whether it was doomed by climate and its genes, is probably one mystery that will never be solved. 
 
 • The picture caption to the second image was amended on 12 January 2016. An earlier versions said the Gigantopithecus disappeared a million years ago from the surface of the Earth. This has been corrected to say 100,000 years ago. 
 

– The world may not have had a King Kong as Hollywood imagined him to be, but the next best thing was a creature called Gigantopithecus that roamed 100,000 years ago. The largest ape known to man stood some 9 feet tall and weighed half a ton, gorging on fruit in what used to be semi-tropical forests of Southeast Asia, explains AFP. As it turns out, the giant ape's demise had nothing to do with unrequited love and everything to do with its diet in a changing world, according to a new study. When the forests began turning into grasslands, Gigantopithecus ran out of food, say researchers. Other apes were able to adapt by adding grass, leaves, and roots to their diet, but for reasons that remain unclear, Gigantopithecus didn't make the switch. “When during the Pleistocene, more and more forested area turned into savannah landscapes, there was simply an insufficient food supply," says researcher Herve Bocherens of Germany's Tübingen University. "Gigantopithecus probably did not have the same ecological flexibility and possibly lacked the physiological ability to resist stress and food shortage." Fossil records for the ape are skimpy: A post at Laboratory Equipment notes that it wasn't identified until 1935, and then drew quick comparisons to King Kong because the movie had come out just two years prior. In the new study, researchers analyzed carbon isotopes in teeth and jaw bone fossils to conclude that the ape was a strict vegetarian that probably even shied away from bamboo. (Another famous animal—Darwin's finches—might soon be on the extinct list, too.)