Researchers Find Rare Ancestor of Today’s Monkeys

A newly discovered ape species found in Spain may represent the last common ancestor of today’s great ape family, which includes both gorillas and humans.

The fossilized skeleton represents a rare find from a period shortly after the ancestors of today’s monkeys, or lesser apes, and the larger primates branched off, 11 million to 16 million years ago.

The relatively complete skeleton, found near the village of Pierola in Catalonia, shows a variety of features shared with modern great apes. While a few other fossils of possible great-ape ancestors have been found in Africa, their features have been less developed than those of the new creature, a male dubbed Pierolapithecus catalaunicus.

“The importance of this new fossil is that for the first time, all the key areas that define modern great apes are well-preserved,” said Salvador Moya-Sola, a researcher at the Miguel Crusafont Institute of Paleontology in Barcelona and lead author of a report published Friday in the journal Science.

Although the ape’s skeleton was found in northern Spain, Moya-Sola believes the species also lived in Africa, which may have been connected by a land bridge to Europe during the era the ape lived.

“Africa is the factory of primates. In the fossil record of the Miocene era in Africa, we have found a fantastic diversity of hominids with monkey-like body structures. In Eurasia, apes appeared suddenly in the middle of this time _ before then primates there were nearly unknown,” the researcher said.

The ape Moya-Sola’s team found was a bit smaller than today’s chimpanzees, and was probably a fruit-eater, given the nature of its teeth.

The discovery came just as the team was beginning to work at a new site. A bulldozer clearing the land for more careful digging churned up a tooth. “Paleontologists in Spain say ‘you don’t find a good fossil, the good fossil finds you,’ ” Moya-Sola said.

The team went on to find more teeth, parts of the skull, spine, ribcage, hands and feet. Most of the bones show signs of specialized climbing abilities that link the animal to modern great apes, rather than monkeys, which have more generalized, versatile movement abilities.

The ribcage, or thorax, is especially like that of modern apes, wider and flatter than rib assemblies found in monkeys, the researchers said. “This is the most important anatomical part of this fossil, because it’s the first time that the modern ape-like thorax has been found in the fossil record,” Maya-Sola said.

This shape of ribcage, along with a stiff lower spine and shoulder blades that lie along its back rather than to the side, would have helped Pierolapithecus maintain upright posture and easily climb up and down trees.

The era when the ape lived was generally warmer and dryer than today’s climate, a mild period before the onset of ice ages in the Northern Hemisphere, marked by more open grasslands and desert replacing tropical forests in many areas.

On the Net: www.sciencemag.org

(Reach Lee Bowman at bowmanl(at)shns.com)

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