Nearly 80 years ago, Dutch anthropologist Gustav Heinrich Ralph von Koenigswald discovered a giant human-like tooth in a drug store in Hong Kong, and named the animal it came from Gigantopithecus.

Since then, thousands more large teeth – and three jawbones – have come to light in southern Asia. They show that Gigantopithecus stood up to 3 metres tall, making it the largest known ape, and was probably related to orang-utans. But why it went extinct remains unclear.