"Gigantopithecus blacki" was named by anthropologist Ralph von Koenigswald in 1935 based on two third lower molar teeth, which, he noted, were of enormous size (the first was ""Ein gewaltig grosser (...) Molar"", the second was described as ""der enorme Grösse besitzt""), measuring . The specific name "blacki" is in honour of Canadian palaeoanthropologist Davidson Black, who had studied human evolution in China and had died the previous year. Von Koenigswald, working for the Dutch East Indies Mineralogical Survey on Java, had found the teeth in a drugstore in Hong Kong where they were being sold as "dragon bones" to be used in traditional Chinese medicine. By 1939, after purchasing more teeth, he determined they had originated somewhere in Guangdong or Guangxi. He could not formally describe the type specimen until 1952 due to his internment by Japanese forces during World War II. The originally discovered teeth are part of the collection of the University of Utrecht.