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Meet Pliobates catalonia, an extinct species of ape that roamed the jungles of Catalonia some 11.5 million years ago. Because of this ancient creature’s many surprising physical characteristics, researchers are having to revise their conceptions of what the last common ancestor of all living apes—humans included—might have looked like.
Pliobates lived long after a time when great apes are believed to have split from small-bodied apes, about 17 million years ago. The discovery of this new fossil—which features characteristics of small-bodied apes, great apes, and even monkeys—is forcing a rethink of early ape evolution. The details of the study can be found in this issue of Science.
“This fossil discovery is providing a missing chapter to the beginning of ape and human history,” noted Sergio Almécija, assistant professor of anthropology in the Center for the Advanced Study of Human Paleobiology at GW’s Columbian College of Arts and Sciences, in a release.
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Anthropologists used to believe, perhaps counterintuivitely, that small apes evolved from larger-bodied apes, mainly due to the lack of small apes and ancient gibbons in the fossil record. But Almécija and colleagues say that the discovery of Pliobates—a new genus and species of small ape that existed before the evolutionary divergence of greater apes and lesser apes—shows that small and large apes may have co-existed around the time when hominoids first emerged.
Read full, original post: This Extinct Species is Changing What We Know About Early Ape Evolution
