NATURE retraces the life of Titus, silverback leader, from birth to present reign, spanning a tumultuous period in the history of a species and a nation in The Gorilla King.

In 1974, renowned primatologist Dian Fossey introduced a young researcher named Kelly Stewart to a gorilla family Fossey was studying. Stewart, daughter of actor Jimmy Stewart, was the first to see a tiny new baby gorilla. She named him Titus, and her journal entry began the up-close observation of his life that researchers have continued to this day. Titus’s turbulent life story, from orphan to ruler and the challenge to his throne today, is chronicled in The Gorilla King.

At 33 years old, the 400-pound silverback Titus has ruled for nearly half his life, an astonishing feat given the early trials he faced. When Titus was four, his father was slaughtered by poachers. Shortly after, his infant sister was killed in a coup attempt by an interloper named Beetsme. It wasn’t unusual; when a male outsider takes over a group, he will kill all the infants in order to sire his own offspring. Titus’s mother and other sister fled, leaving him orphaned and abandoned.

In 1991, at age 17, Titus surprised researchers when he deposed Beetsme in a bloodless coup. Titus was entering his prime, but Rwanda was descending into the chaos of civil war, forcing researchers to flee. It created the only gap in his life’s record.

Follow the entire saga of Titus’s reign in The Gorilla King.

To order a copy of The Gorilla King, please visit the NATURE Shop.

Online content for The Gorilla King was originally posted April 2008.

In 1967, local villagers in Africa’s Equitorial Guinea captured a remarkable baby gorilla. This young male was unlike any gorilla the villagers had seen before; instead of the thick brown fur of most gorillas, this baby had a coat of pure white. Through a series of fortunate circumstances, the rare white gorilla ended up at the Barcelona Zoo, where he became an international star. He was given the Spanish name Copito de Nieve and the English name Snowflake.

NATURE’s Snowflake: The White Gorilla tells the story of this remarkable animal, from his loving upbringing by humans to his eventual death from skin cancer in 2003. It also tracks the revolutionary changes in our understanding of how best to care for gorillas that have taken place during Snowflake’s lifetime.

Captive gorillas were once confined to solitary cells and fed meat. Today, some zoos spend millions constructing environments that are more in keeping with gorillas’ natural habitats, where the animals can live in groups as they do in the wild. We now know that gorillas are vegetarians and have adapted feeding practices accordingly. Since 1956, when the first baby gorilla was born in captivity at an Ohio zoo, zoos have developed new and better ways to nurture gorilla families.

Let NATURE’s Snowflake: The White Gorilla take you on a fascinating excursion into this remarkable world and introduce you to history’s only known albino gorilla.

Online content for Snowflake: The White Gorilla was originally posted February 2005.

Who can resist the magnetic allure of a baby? The presence of little ones of any species invariably generates instant attention and concern from onlookers. In fact, it seems that both humans and animals are hard-wired to find youngsters adorable. The practical and essential reasons why the very young have an ability to play on our heart strings are explored in Baby Tales.

Baby Tales demonstrates how young animals learn and develop, and examines the role of “cuteness” in helping to forge and solidify bonds between mother and offspring. Many newborns in the animal kingdom are entirely dependent upon their mothers — and sometimes their fathers, as well — for survival. And, especially in the wild, nurturing and protecting the young can require enormous effort, courage, and self-sacrifice. The cuteness of offspring creates a strong visual bond that helps evoke a caring response in parents, which must spend months, if not years, feeding, protecting, and teaching their young to survive on their own.

To order a copy of Baby Tales, please visit the NATURE Shop.

Online content for Baby Tales was originally posted March 2001.