Harvard fell heir yesterday to a dead gorilla with water-filled lungs, a missing brain, and a broken heart.
Makoko drowned Sunday at the Bronx Zoo. He lumbered outside to his six-foot moat early in the afternoon. While 1,000 New Yorkers watched, he fell in.
Yesterday the zoo--which calls Makoko "the finest specimen in the world"--embalmed the ape and sent the body to the Medical School, the brain to Columbia.
At 14 years old, Makoko was valued at $75,000. The zoo hoped to mate him with 12-years-old Oka in the next cage and thus produce the first baby gorillas spawned in captivity. When Makoko died, a keeper predicted that Oka "will know what's happened. She'll grieve. She won't live now." Instead, she padded around her cage yesterday as if nothing had happened. A zoo official, according to the Associated Press, said the faithless Oka didn't even miss Makoko.
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