Captain von Beringe and the first mountain gorilla known to science, Mount Sabyinyo

19 August 1902. An expedition left Usumbura, now Bujumbura, in German East Africa. It was led by Captain Friedrich Robert von Beringe, an officer of the German colonial force. With him went a physician, Dr. Engeland, Corporal Ehrhardt and twenty local troops. They travelled first to the court of King Yuhi V Musinga of Rwanda. Then they turned north, toward the Virunga volcanoes.

The mountains were not empty of stories. The Batwa had lived alongside these animals for a very long time. Local people told of large apes raiding their fields. Nineteenth-century explorers had heard tales of hairy humanoid creatures on the Virunga slopes. European science had no name for any of it.

Von Beringe climbed Mount Sabyinyo with Dr. Engeland and five askaris. They made camp at about 3,100 metres, on a very narrow ridge. The tent pegs had to be driven into the slope. The askaris sheltered in rock caves and kept fires going.

17 October 1902. From the camp, the party saw them. In von Beringe's words, "a herd of black, large apes", trying to climb the highest peak of the volcano. Two large animals were brought down. Both fell into a crater gorge opening to the northeast.

Only one could be recovered. After five hours of strenuous work, it was hauled up on a rope. It was a large male, about 1.5 metres long. Black. No hair on the chest. Its hands and feet were very large.

Von Beringe was puzzled. "Unfortunately I was not able to determine the genus of the ape," he wrote. It was too big for a chimpanzee. And gorillas had not been recorded around the lakes.

The journey back cost the evidence dearly. On the way to Usumbura, a hyena ate the skin and one hand. The skull and part of the skeleton survived. They reached Paul Matschie at the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin. In 1903 he concluded that this was a new species. He called it Gorilla beringei, though one page of his paper misspelled it Gorilla beringeri. The skull is still held in Berlin as the holotype, ZMB 13254.

There was never a hoax to expose. The conventional explanation is simple. This was a population of gorilla that European science had not yet described. For the people who lived beneath the volcanoes, it was no discovery at all.

The arguments came later. Was it a full species or a subspecies? It was reclassified as Gorilla gorilla beringei. Today it is the mountain gorilla, Gorilla beringei beringei, one of two subspecies of the eastern gorilla. Then came the ethics. Gorilla Highlands estimates 54 gorillas were shot for science between 1902 and 1925. Carl Akeley shot five, then campaigned for Albert National Park. It was created in 1925.

Cryptozoology writers now list the mountain gorilla among the cryptids that turned out to be real, beside the giant squid and the platypus. In 2002, for the centenary, Rwanda declared 17 October National Gorilla Day. Two years later, the documentary The Gorillas of my Grandfather followed Andreas von Beringe, a Viennese doctor, as he retraced his grandfather's route.