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Fri 19 Nov, 2004 08:55 am
BBC reports (Full story:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4014351.stm )
'Original' great ape discovered
By Paul Rincon
BBC News science reporter
Could this be the last common ancestor of humans and great apes?
Scientists have unearthed remains of a primate that could have been ancestral not only to humans but to all great apes, including chimps and gorillas.
The partial skeleton of this 13-million-year-old "missing link" was found by palaeontologists working at a dig site near Barcelona in Spain.
Details of the sensational discovery appear in Science magazine.
The new specimen was probably male, a fruit-eater and was slightly smaller than a chimpanzee, researchers say.
"It's very impressive because of its completeness"
David Begun, University of Toronto
Palaeontologists were just getting started at the dig when a bulldozer churned up a tooth.
Further investigation yielded one of the most complete ape skeletons known from the Miocene Epoch (about 22 to 5.5 million years ago).
Salvador Moyà-Solà of the Miquel Crusafont Institute of Palaeontology in Barcelona and colleagues subsequently found parts of the skull, ribcage, spine, hands and feet, along with other bones.
They have assigned it to an entirely new family and species: Pierolapithecus catalaunicus.
Monkey business
Great apes are thought - on the basis of genetic and other evidence - to have separated from another primate group known as the lesser apes some time between 11 and 16 million years ago (The lesser apes include gibbons and siamang).
It is fascinating, therefore, for a specimen like Pierolapithecus to turn up right in this window...................
I don't want to see speculative models, I want to see the bones! Will have to search out more info after I get through this long list of new posts here on a2k.
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