Far away, on the top of a jungle mountain, hidden in cloud, lived the rarest of all the great apes. Many years ago a cargo plane crashed upon the mountain, inside it were crates full of all sorts of books. Back then, a young ape got inside the plane and found a broken crate. He got very excited seeing strange markings and lots of pictures in the books. In the coming months he learnt to read. In time he found some books that he loved, they were funny tales about strange animals and how they came to be known by their names. These were the ‘Just So’ stories by Rudyard Kipling. As he got older and had young apes he taught them all the stories he could, until he realised it was easier to teach them to read for themselves. This whole family of apes were peculiar for their gray backs. During the rainy season, all the apes of the mountain always got very bored, so the gray backs would sit and tell their wonderful stories, some of which they were now making up for themselves.
That first story reading ape was now a grand old patriarch who was loved by all. Now word of these strange apes began to leak out into the world and men came looking for them. At first, the apes hid but, one stormy day a lone explorer stumbled upon a gray back, telling a group of young apes some very familiar tales. The explorer recorded it all and, when he got back to his home, he created quite a storm of his own with his recording. Very soon the world came to know of the great apes who were now called Bibliopithecus – the book apes!
Click on the photo below to find out more about one of these peculiar individuals and what he gets up to!