Mountain gorilla

The mountain gorilla (Gorilla beringei beringei) is one of the two subspecies of the eastern gorilla. It is listed as endangered by the IUCN as of 2018. There are two populations: One is found in the Virunga volcanic mountains of Central/East Africa, within three National Parks: Mgahinga, in southwest Uganda; Volcanoes, in northwest Rwanda; and Virunga, in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The other population is found in Uganda's Bwindi Impenetrable National Park. Some primatologists speculate the Bwindi population is a separate subspecies, though no description has been finalized. As of June 2018, there were more than 1,000 individuals. Mountain gorillas are descendants of ancestral monkeys and apes found in Africa and Arabia during the start of the Oligocene epoch (34–24 million years ago). The fossil record provides evidence of the hominoid primates (apes) found in East Africa approximately 22–32 million years ago. The fossil record of the area where mountain gorillas live is particularly poor and so its evolutionary history is not clear. It was about 8.8 to 12 million years ago that the group of primates who were to evolve into gorillas split from their common ancestor with humans and chimps; this is when the genus Gorilla emerged. Mountain gorillas have been isolated from eastern lowland gorillas for approximately 10,000 years and these two taxa separated from their western counterparts approximately 1.2 to 3 million years ago. The genus was first referenced as Troglodytes in 1847, but renamed to Gorilla in 1852. It was not until 1967 that the taxonomist Colin Groves proposed that all gorillas be regarded as one species (Gorilla gorilla) with three subspecies Gorilla gorilla gorilla (western lowland gorilla), Gorilla gorilla graueri (lowland gorillas found west of the Virungas) and Gorilla gorilla beringei (mountain gorillas, including Gorilla beringei, found in the Virungas and Bwindi). In 2003, after a review, they were divided into two species (Gorilla gorilla and Gorilla beringei) by The World Conservation Union (IUCN).