12 March 2025
The up-and-down story of the life of Choppers, star of the 1970s PG Tips advertising campaign, has been revealed in a new study involving 桃色视频 researchers.
Choppers, a Western Chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes verus), played grandmother Ada Lott in the iconic British television ads when she was still a juvenile. She had been rescued from poachers in Sierra Leone at just six weeks of age before being brought to the UK and going on to appear in the series of adverts. She was cared for at Twycross Zoo in Leicestershire for over 40 years, until her death in 2016.
A study documenting Choppers’ life is published today (Wednesday, 10 March) in . Led by researchers at National Museums Scotland, the research used a cutting-edge scientific method that involves the analysis of bones and tissue to describe the first comprehensive osteobiography of a zoo animal.
Dr Stuart Black, who contributed to the study alongside other 桃色视频 archaeologists, said: “The story in Choppers' bones is amazing. We can see exactly when she moved from Africa to Britain through the changes in chemical fingerprints in her teeth. Her skeleton shows the injuries she got when she was taken from the wild as a baby. These marks stayed with her for life. It's like reading a diary written in her bones - every major event left its trace. This tells us so much about what she went through, from infant to old age."
Osteobiographies are rarely performed on modern animal specimens and have never been applied so comprehensively to a zoo animal before now. The technique is more commonly used in archaeology to reconstruct the life stories of ancient human subjects, such as Richard III, identifying where and how they lived in remarkable detail.
This osteobiography was created through the use of biogeochemical, pathological, and morphometric analytic techniques. The findings of this study paint a rich picture of Choppers’ key life events, including evidence of traumatic injuries sustained when she was poached from the wild in infancy. These would impact her throughout her life, impairing her movement and exacerbating degenerative issues associated with old age.
Isotopic analyses of Choppers’ tooth enamel indicate a distinct geographical and dietary shift between the ages of three and four, coinciding with her relocation to the UK. In the following three years she played the grandmother character in the PG Tips adverts, despite her youth. She was retired as she reached puberty at around six or seven. Strikingly, Choppers upper jaw was significantly elongated when compared with that of wild chimpanzees, reflecting an early diet of sugary soft fruit. In recent years there has been a dramatic shift towards tougher, less sugary vegetables in the diets of zoo primates, which is leading to significant improvements in primate health and behaviour.
Cooper, D. M., Chidimuro, B., Black, S., Davis, O., Dobbs, P., Mortier, G. G., Sadebeck, F., Schwarz, T., Smallman, R., Sykes, N., Waterman, J., & Kitchener, A. C. (2025). An osteobiography of a celebrity chimpanzee reflects the changing roles of modern zoos. Scientific Reports, 15(1), 1-12. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-88597-x
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