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We bring you the finest handmade stuffed plush animals in the World
Big Furry Friends is your source for Lifesize, Life Size, Life-like and Realistic Large Plush Stuffed Animals
Not just great gifts for children and adults, these beautiful pieces make great corporate gifts, baby gifts and display pieces for homes, office and businesses, theatrical displays, commercial and movie props......
All our animals are hand-made from of the finest plush stuffed animal artisans in the world. They are life-like, some lifesize and all realistic with careful attention to detail. They make an impressive gift whether corporate or personal, but also make a statement as a corporate mascot or display at your company's headquarters. Our plush animals are used for staging homes for sale, creating themed weddings, conventions and events where these furry friends add a real 'wow' factor. Our life-like plush stuffed animals have also been used in museums, as well as theatrical props in movies, commercials and on live stage productions all over the world. What is contained here is a sampling of what our artisans have to offer...
Do you need a true-to life size T-Rex? A giant Wooly Mammoth or other animal for your Museum?
If you can imagine it, we can create it for you!
Zimbabwe Gorilla Lifesize Large Plush Stuffed Animals
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Zimbabwe Gorilla
Handmade
Item # 19RM33
Size: 28"H x 19.75W
Price: $ 399
This is a hand-crafted collection of realistic plush, sometimes lifesize animals. The "coat" of each animal is meticulously cut by hand, never stamped out by machine. Gentle paws, swishing tails, and especially soulful eyes and faces are lovingly detailed to give each character a life-like look.
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Gorillas are the largest of the living primates. They are ground-dwelling and predominantly herbivorous. They inhabit the forests of central Africa. Gorillas are divided into two species and (still under debate as of 2008) either four or five subspecies. The DNA of gorillas is 98%–99% identical to that of a human, and they are the next closest living relatives to humans after the two chimpanzee species.
Gorillas' natural habitats cover tropical or subtropical forests in Africa. Although their range covers a small percentage of Africa, gorillas cover a wide range of elevations. The Mountain Gorilla inhabits the Albertine Rift montane cloud forests of the Virunga Volcanoes, ranging in altitude from 2,200–4,300 metres (7,200–14,100 ft). Lowland Gorillas live in dense forests and lowland swamps and marshes as low as sea level, with Western Lowland Gorillas living in Central West African countries and Eastern Lowland Gorillas living in the Democratic Republic of the Congo near its border with Rwanda
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. The name was derived from the Greek word (Gorillai), a "tribe of hairy women" described by Hanno the Navigator, a Carthaginian navigator and possible visitor (circa 480 BC) to the area that later became Sierra Leone.
The word "gorilla" comes from the history of Hanno the Navigator, a Carthaginian explorer on an expedition on the west African coast. They encountered "a savage people, the greater part of whom were women, whose bodies were hairy, and who our interpreters called Gorillae". The word was then later used as the species name, though it is unknown whether what these ancient Carthaginians encountered were truly gorillas, another species of ape or monkeys, or humans.
American physician and missionary Thomas Staughton Savage obtained the first specimens (the skull and other bones) during his time in Liberia in Africa. The first scientific description of gorillas dates back to an article by Savage and the naturalist Jeffries Wyman in 1847 in Proceedings of the Boston Society of Natural History, where Troglodytes gorilla is described, now known as the Western Gorilla. Other species of gorilla are described in the next couple of years.
Explorer Paul du Chaillu was the first westerner to see a live gorilla during his travel through western equatorial Africa from 1856 to 1859. He brought dead specimens to the UK in 1861.
The first systematic study was not conducted until the 1920s, when Carl Akeley of the American Museum of Natural History traveled to Africa to hunt for an animal to be shot and stuffed. On his first trip he was accompanied by his friends Mary Bradley, a famous mystery writer, and her husband. After their trip, Mary Bradley wrote On the Gorilla Trail. She later became an advocate for the conservation of gorillas and wrote several more books (mainly for children). In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Robert Yerkes and his wife Ava helped further the study of gorillas when they sent Harold Bigham to Africa. Yerkes also wrote a book in 1929 about the great apes.
After World War II, George Schaller was one of the first researchers to go into the field and study primates. In 1959, he conducted a systematic study of the mountain gorilla in the wild and published his work. Years later, at the behest of Louis Leakey and the National Geographic, Dian Fossey conducted a much longer and more comprehensive study of the Mountain Gorilla. It was not until she published her work that many misconceptions and myths about gorillas were finally disproved, including the myth that gorillas are violent.
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