Pliobates offer insight into primate evolution after a recent discovery of primate fossils in Spain. An 11.6 million year old primate fossil found by researchers might change what the world knows about primate evolution.
The fossil shows trait similarity with greater apes that appeared later but also has features that are linked to smaller apes, more primitive than the first category. As the specimen has traits that can be associated with both the greater apes and the smaller ones, the finding may indicate that small apes may have played a more important and more recent role in the evolution of great apes than it was originally thought.
The remains were found in Catalonia and researchers have found out interesting information about the way the small ape lived. Its diet was based on fruit and it managed to coexist in an environment filled with dangerous predators and ancient beasts, in the warm climate of a wet forest.
There were 70 bones discovered, some of them just fragments but it seems the skull they found is one of the best preserved primate skulls of such an old age. Scientists estimated that the ape’s weight was only between 9 to 11 pounds, which is a lot less than any monkey today weighs.
As per the tradition, they gave the monkey a name, Laia. However, the scientific name for the primate is Pliobates. Paleobiologist David Alba of the Catalan Institute of Paleontology explained the importance of the discovery: the ape shows the proportions of a small ape like a gibbon in terms of the aspect of the cranium, but has different body proportions than expected, in that its arms and legs are less elongated.
These characteristics are of vital importance as the animal seems to be a missing link between the primitive smaller apes and their successors, the more modern great apes. Features of this primate link it to both the groups, providing a connection between their evolutions.
Most importantly, the discovery points at the fact that the predecessors of both apes and even humans may have been smaller and more gibbon like in appearance than scientists had originally thought before the finding of the fossil.
As researchers had originally assumed that the great apes had already appeared 10 million years ago, the discovery of Laia might now point towards this type of ape only emerging much later. The common ancestry of apes and monkeys goes back 25 million years ago, with the apes later being divided into two groups of their own, lesser and greater. The greater apes are, according to scientists, the group from which human beings later descended.
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