Meanings
- not comparableSimilar to, characteristic of, or pertaining to gorillas.
The police raid the house, encountering a gorilline creature of fantastic strength-- but with a silver globe where its head should be.
1990, Everett Franklin Bleiler, Science-fiction, the Early Years, page 5254 more examples
If anything, the problem of gorilline origins is greater than that of human origins, for which there is a substantial fossil record stretching back to 4 m.y.ago.
1985, Zeitschrift für Morphologie und Anthropologie, page 126If the species from which the Kapsomin and Cheboit teeth came is part of the gorilla clade, then there are important implications for the timing of events in gorilline evolution, and they make it less likely that European genera such as Ouranopithecus are ancestral to African apes or hominids.
2005, Francesco d’Errico, Lucinda Backwell, Bernard Malauzat, From Tools to Symbols: From Early Hominids to Modern HumansAgainst the backdrop of these global and local climatic changes, the LCA of African apes and humans split into a gorilline clade and Pan-Homo clade, and the latter split again into panin and hominin clades.
2012, David R. Begun, A Companion to PaleoanthropologyThis leaves us with the possibility, disquieting to current anthropological assumptions, that the massive-jawed Heidelberg man did not necessarily have a gorilline cranium.
2021, Edward B. Davis, The Antievolution Pamphlets of Harry Rimmer
plural gorillines
- biologyAny hominid in the proposed subfamily Gorillinae (corresponding to the tribus Gorillini).
A very fragmentary canine tooth of a putative "gorilline” was reported by Cecchi and Pickford in 1989 from Nkondo, western Uganda, dating to perhaps 3.5 ma ( see Boaz, 1994 ).
1995, Noel Thomas Boaz, Linda D. Wolfe, Biological Anthropology: The State of the Science, page 362 more examples
In this contribution we adopt a less radical solution: we lump all the great apes into the family Hominidae; within that grouping, we recognizes ^([sic]) three living subfamilies, the Ponginae (or “pongines”) for the orangutans, the Gorillinae (or “gorillines”) for the gorillas, and the Homininae (or "hominines") for both modern humans and chimpanzees.
2004, Joel Cracraft, Michael J. Donoghue, Assembling the Tree of Life, page 518Its dental traits strongly indicate that it is the earliest species of the subfamily Gorillinae, suggesting that the last common ancestor between hominines (chimpanzees and humans) and gorillines may have lived more than 10 million years ago, that is, 2 million years earlier than the previously believed date of divergence based on DNA molecular-clock calibrations.
2010, H. James Birx, 21st Century Anthropology: A Reference Handbook
Cite this entry
gorilline. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 3, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/gorilline
“gorilline.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/gorilline. Accessed November 3, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “gorilline,” accessed November 3, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/gorilline.
Source: gorilline on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.