The word "gorilla" comes from the history of Hanno the Navigator, ( 500 BC) a Carthaginian explorer on an expedition on the west African coast to the area that later became Sierra Leone [REF].
The American physician and missionary Thomas Staughton Savage and naturalist Jeffries Wyman first described the western gorilla (they called it Troglodytes gorilla) in 1847 from specimens obtained in Liberia [REF].