Thursday 22 November 2018

Earth's Smallest Ape Weighed 8 lbs., Lived 12.5 Million Years Ago


By Owen Jarus, Live Science Contributor | November 6, 2018 04:00pm ET
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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