Really Tall Orangutans

I learned something about orangutans recently that has completely shocked me for some reason and I feel the need to talk about it.

Photo of a male orangutan at the St. Louis Zoo taken on a family trip a few years back.

Really Tall Orangutans

K.L. Orion

How tall do you think an orangutan is? 

Don’t look it up. Just think about it for a second. 

Before I continue, I want to make the quick disclaimer that this is likely going to be a very short and very informal post. I usually use this time of week for posting speculative evolution pieces, but the ideas I have for that are ones I want to save for a later week. So for today, I want to talk about something I just recently learned that is driving me a little crazy. 

When I think about orangutans, I think about these stockily built orange apes who live in the Indonesian jungles. Lanky arms help them sway through the treetops, where they spend most of their lives. They are mostly solitary, only really interacting with other orangutans if it is a mother caring for her baby. Another thing really interesting is how mystical orangutans look. They look like mythical humanoids with their almost human yet not human appearance. I especially love how downright bizarre the males look, with their cheek flanges and their throat sacks. 

Orangutans are also really big. Not many people actually appreciate their size. I think that’s because Western Society thinks of baby orangutans rather than adults. The same thing happened with chimpanzees for many of the same reasons. I bet when most people think about chimpanzees, they think of the pale little Curious George monkeys who look like little furry people, rather than the much larger black-skinned humanoids they actually are. And they can get tall. I believe they can get around four to five feet tall when standing upright, possibly taller. These two great apes suffer from this problem because westerners were first introduced to both species through their infants. For a long time, Europeans only knew orangutans and chimpanzees from specimens in their infancies. Since then, pop culture most often displays these apes as infants because the infants are easier to train and handle. So whenever you see an orangutan or chimp in a movie, it's likely a baby. 

Because of these factors (and a few others), people tend to underestimate how big the great apes can be. A full grown male orangutan, for example, can weigh more than three hundred pounds. That’s huge. But what I underestimated about the legendary orangutan is how tall they get. I’ve seen orangutans in person before. They are big, I’ve always known that. But oddly enough, I never got a good look at how tall they are. They are very stockily-built animals, meaning I always thought their incredible weight came from how round they were (which they are very round) rather than how tall they were. Turns out, it was a combination of both. 

Even after seeing them in person, if you had to ask me how tall I thought orangutans are, I’d say something around three to four feet. I’m not entirely wrong for thinking that, since some do stay around that height. But I was wrong for thinking that they maxed out at that height. According to the Denver Zoo, male Sumatran orangutans can get up to six feet tall. I did a little more digging into it, and I’ve found that this measurement is more of an approximation, but it’s pretty darn close. They get around six feet tall. That’s one tall primate. The more I learn about orangutans, the more I believe they have earned their name. Orangutan roughly means “person of the forest” or something along those lines. And, I mean they are. Their similarities with humans are extremely uncanny, and this has only added to that. 

I didn’t include any pictures out of fear of violating copyright or something, but I urge you to go look up orangutans compared to humans. The pictures are humbling. The more I learn about orangutans and other great apes in general, the more it feels like I’m learning about a Lord of the Rings race rather than an actual primate. Apes are weird. And none of this even mentions the strength of these animals. Orangutans have earned their title of being the largest arboreal animal, considering some are tall enough to stare straight into my massive forehead. That six foot tall thing is just wild to me. But the issue here is that orangutans aren’t even the largest primates alive today. That title goes to the somehow even bigger gorilla.  

All of a sudden, King Kong doesn’t seem that unrealistic anymore.