The remains
of the smallest ape ever known to walk the Earth may have been discovered in
the hills of Kenya, scientists say.
Weighing
around 7.7 pounds (3.5 kilograms), the ape lived around 12.5 million years ago
in Kenya. While other species of small ape are known to have existed, this one
may be the smallest, scientists wrote in a paper set to be published in
December in the Journal
of Human Evolution.
Named Simiolus minutus, the new species is
known from only three tiny teeth, one of which was discovered by James Rossie,
an anthropology professor at Stony Brook University in New York, during
fieldwork in Kenya's Tugen Hills, in 2004. [In
Photos: A Game-Changing Primate Discovery]
Rossie and
his co-author, Andrew Hill, an anthropology professor at Yale University who
died in 2015, examined the tooth to see if it matched any known species of ape.
It did not, though the tiny tooth is anatomically similar, they found, to two
other teeth uncovered in previous paleontological expeditions in Kenya. They
concluded that the three teeth belong to a new species of ape.
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