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Description
UPDATE (2x):
A solid size reference for the jaw; Zhang et al. (2016)
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pd…

If anyone was wondering about bLAZZE92's chart, this was one of my references for the skeletal reconstruction;
3uwusw.dm2304.livefilestore.co…
If you're wondering why we ended up with two massively different sizes, the answer lies in the fact my Gigantopithecus has a much bigger jaw, from an exceptionally large specimen.... which closely matches the attached scale to photographs in the above study, and probably where all those photos online came from. Keep in mind, bLAZZE92's image is still a reliable, fair measure- most Gigantopithecus species don't grow close to this size I depicted at all, and neither, it seems, do quite a few G. blacki specimens. bLAZZE92's specimen is quite a typical adult size and easily representative of the animals, mine drawn from a very large individual member of a population of bigger ones.

Anyway, I'll leave the rest of the old description below, as I won't pretend I knew this before making the artwork (cough).

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Ok, I admit. This time I took a bit of a lazy route when reconstructing this animal due to the difficulty in finding more solid sources.... but the end result seems to endorse the same size as the scientific literature, so I think it worked out. It's been sitting in a half-finished state for so long I decided it's time to just release it. Basically I took a photo of a jaw fragment next to a human mandible, and from there I scaled a long series of photos of skeletons and hypothetical skull reconstructions of a few different angles until they matched. Luckily for me, the jaw seemed to match a 13cm measurement, and the overall ape appeared to stand somewhere between 2.5 and 3 meters tall, so I decided it was probably done correctly. Not something I would normally do, but I was getting pretty tired of trawling through tooth-only studies and wild bigfoot theory sites, so had to resort to plan B.

Then came the fleshing out part. I didn't want to do another "ape standing awkwardly upright to demonstrate its 3-meter-tallness", but instead in a comfortable quadrupedal pose, by re-arranging the limbs and body of the skeleton photos. Then came lots, and lots, and lots of Orangutan pictures. I wanted to get the general facial anatomy, without actually just copying an Orangutan (their faces would be slightly differently shaped, after all- especially from the major difference in teeth alone- more on that later). Eventually after a lot of hard work, I managed to get a nice looking face. Then there was the fur- again, not *too* dissimilar from Orangutans, but I gave a slightly more ruddy/brown/gold hue than the coppery reds of modern Orangutans. This proved extremely hard in photoshop with many attempts looking extremely fake-looking.... but thankfully the amazing KRITA's more sophisticated brushes allowed the wispy, tangled shaggy fur of Orangutans to be more accurately depicted.
Then I needed to illustrate the hands and feet- probably the hardest to research. The big problem with capturing an Orangutan's walk is that they don't have a SPECIFIC walk like knuckle-walking apes do. They'll walk on knuckles, palms, fists... whatever they feel like. Harder still, the vast majority of photos of Orangutans walking on the ground happen to be in areas thick with grass or leaf litter.... concealing the hands and feet entirely. Naturally a 300kg likely-grounded ape would need a strong walking position, but I felt it a bit of a stretch to instantly imply they convergently-developed strict knuckle-walking, so I opted for a fist-walking position (after finding out exactly what Orangutan hands and feet actually look like from a sideways angle)!

Information I swiped from Wikipedia and this study by Zhang and Harrison (2016), particularly the size, weight and diet.
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pd…

A few other facts:
1- Other gigantopithecus (including giganteus) are substantially smaller than blacki, despite the name.
2- It's possible gigantopithecus may have eaten bamboo as well (which would probably explain how it went extinct, hehe), apparently.
3- For a long time it was believed gigantopithecus was most closely related to humans based on the blunt teeth of the jaw (like ours) rather than pronounced fangs. However, the jaw itself more closely fits the shape of a Pongo ape (Orangutan), which I might point out, had more similar habitat distribution. The evidence suggests the similarities are a coincidence from dietary demands (chewing on hard plants), and Gigantopithecus is NOT a close relative of humans at all (humans are far more closely related to chimps and gorillas than the Pongos.
4- If you're wondering about possible links to hypothetical cryptids like bigfoot and yetis, the answer is most likely NO, even if either did turn out to be real. The reason being that the habitat distribution of Gigantopithecus (India, Vietnam, China, Indonesia) is completely and utterly OUTSIDE the alleged ranges of bigfoot (North America(!!!)) and not-quite-within the alleged Yeti habitat (Himalayas, Central Asia and inland China). So if either turn out to be real, they're probably just something else.

Description
UPDATE (2x):
A solid size reference for the jaw; Zhang et al. (2016)
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pd…

If anyone was wondering about bLAZZE92's chart, this was one of my references for the skeletal reconstruction;
3uwusw.dm2304.livefilestore.co…
If you're wondering why we ended up with two massively different sizes, the answer lies in the fact my Gigantopithecus has a much bigger jaw, from an exceptionally large specimen.... which closely matches the attached scale to photographs in the above study, and probably where all those photos online came from. Keep in mind, bLAZZE92's image is still a reliable, fair measure- most Gigantopithecus species don't grow close to this size I depicted at all, and neither, it seems, do quite a few G. blacki specimens. bLAZZE92's specimen is quite a typical adult size and easily representative of the animals, mine drawn from a very large individual member of a population of bigger ones.

Anyway, I'll leave the rest of the old description below, as I won't pretend I knew this before making the artwork (cough).

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Ok, I admit. This time I took a bit of a lazy route when reconstructing this animal due to the difficulty in finding more solid sources.... but the end result seems to endorse the same size as the scientific literature, so I think it worked out. It's been sitting in a half-finished state for so long I decided it's time to just release it. Basically I took a photo of a jaw fragment next to a human mandible, and from there I scaled a long series of photos of skeletons and hypothetical skull reconstructions of a few different angles until they matched. Luckily for me, the jaw seemed to match a 13cm measurement, and the overall ape appeared to stand somewhere between 2.5 and 3 meters tall, so I decided it was probably done correctly. Not something I would normally do, but I was getting pretty tired of trawling through tooth-only studies and wild bigfoot theory sites, so had to resort to plan B.

Then came the fleshing out part. I didn't want to do another "ape standing awkwardly upright to demonstrate its 3-meter-tallness", but instead in a comfortable quadrupedal pose, by re-arranging the limbs and body of the skeleton photos. Then came lots, and lots, and lots of Orangutan pictures. I wanted to get the general facial anatomy, without actually just copying an Orangutan (their faces would be slightly differently shaped, after all- especially from the major difference in teeth alone- more on that later). Eventually after a lot of hard work, I managed to get a nice looking face. Then there was the fur- again, not *too* dissimilar from Orangutans, but I gave a slightly more ruddy/brown/gold hue than the coppery reds of modern Orangutans. This proved extremely hard in photoshop with many attempts looking extremely fake-looking.... but thankfully the amazing KRITA's more sophisticated brushes allowed the wispy, tangled shaggy fur of Orangutans to be more accurately depicted.
Then I needed to illustrate the hands and feet- probably the hardest to research. The big problem with capturing an Orangutan's walk is that they don't have a SPECIFIC walk like knuckle-walking apes do. They'll walk on knuckles, palms, fists... whatever they feel like. Harder still, the vast majority of photos of Orangutans walking on the ground happen to be in areas thick with grass or leaf litter.... concealing the hands and feet entirely. Naturally a 300kg likely-grounded ape would need a strong walking position, but I felt it a bit of a stretch to instantly imply they convergently-developed strict knuckle-walking, so I opted for a fist-walking position (after finding out exactly what Orangutan hands and feet actually look like from a sideways angle)!

Information I swiped from Wikipedia and this study by Zhang and Harrison (2016), particularly the size, weight and diet.
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pd…

A few other facts:
1- Other gigantopithecus (including giganteus) are substantially smaller than blacki, despite the name.
2- It's possible gigantopithecus may have eaten bamboo as well (which would probably explain how it went extinct, hehe), apparently.
3- For a long time it was believed gigantopithecus was most closely related to humans based on the blunt teeth of the jaw (like ours) rather than pronounced fangs. However, the jaw itself more closely fits the shape of a Pongo ape (Orangutan), which I might point out, had more similar habitat distribution. The evidence suggests the similarities are a coincidence from dietary demands (chewing on hard plants), and Gigantopithecus is NOT a close relative of humans at all (humans are far more closely related to chimps and gorillas than the Pongos.
4- If you're wondering about possible links to hypothetical cryptids like bigfoot and yetis, the answer is most likely NO, even if either did turn out to be real. The reason being that the habitat distribution of Gigantopithecus (India, Vietnam, China, Indonesia) is completely and utterly OUTSIDE the alleged ranges of bigfoot (North America(!!!)) and not-quite-within the alleged Yeti habitat (Himalayas, Central Asia and inland China). So if either turn out to be real, they're probably just something else.