gorilline

English

Adjective

gorilline (not comparable)

1. Similar to, characteristic of, or pertaining to gorillas.
   • 1985, Zeitschrift für Morphologie und Anthropologie, page 126:

     If anything, the problem of gorilline origins is greater than that of human origins, for which there is a substantial fossil record stretching back to 4 m.y.ago.

   • 1990, Everett Franklin Bleiler, Science-fiction, the Early Years, page 525:

     The police raid the house, encountering a gorilline creature of fantastic strength-- but with a silver globe where its head should be.

   • 2005, Francesco d’Errico, Lucinda Backwell, Bernard Malauzat, From Tools to Symbols: From Early Hominids to Modern Humans:

     If the species from which the Kapsomin and Cheboit teeth came is part of the gorilla clade, then there are important implications for the timing of events in gorilline evolution, and they make it less likely that European genera such as Ouranopithecus are ancestral to African apes or hominids.

   • 2012, David R. Begun, A Companion to Paleoanthropology:

     Against the backdrop of these global and local climatic changes, the LCA of African apes and humans split into a gorilline clade and Pan-Homo clade, and the latter split again into panin and hominin clades.

   • 2021, Edward B. Davis, The Antievolution Pamphlets of Harry Rimmer:

     This leaves us with the possibility, disquieting to current anthropological assumptions, that the massive-jawed Heidelberg man did not necessarily have a gorilline cranium.

Noun

gorilline (plural gorillines)

1. (zoology) Any hominid in the proposed subfamily Gorillinae (corresponding to the tribus Gorillini).
   • 1995, Noel Thomas Boaz, Linda D. Wolfe, Biological Anthropology: The State of the Science, page 36:

     A very fragmentary canine tooth of a putative "gorilline” was reported by Cecchi and Pickford in 1989 from Nkondo, western Uganda, dating to perhaps 3.5 ma ( see Boaz, 1994 ).

   • 2004, Joel Cracraft, Michael J. Donoghue, Assembling the Tree of Life, page 518:

     In this contribution we adopt a less radical solution: we lump all the great apes into the family Hominidae; within that grouping, we recognizes ^[sic] three living subfamilies, the Ponginae (or “pongines”) for the orangutans, the Gorillinae (or “gorillines”) for the gorillas, and the Homininae (or "hominines") for both modern humans and chimpanzees.

   • 2010, H. James Birx, 21st Century Anthropology: A Reference Handbook:

     Its dental traits strongly indicate that it is the earliest species of the subfamily Gorillinae, suggesting that the last common ancestor between hominines (chimpanzees and humans) and gorillines may have lived more than 10 million years ago, that is, 2 million years earlier than the previously believed date of divergence based on DNA molecular-clock calibrations.

Related terms

• gorilla