He looks kind of cranky to me. I bet he was busy arguing about evolution...

(CNN) -- Scientists in Spain announced Thursday that they've unearthed a 13 million-year-old fossilized skeleton of an ape that is possibly a common ancestor of humans and great apes, including orangutans, bonobos, chimps and gorillas.

The find could add a yet another branch to the human family tree and fill in a gap in our knowledge of hominoid evolution.

"It's very special," said Frans de Waal of the Yerkes Primate Center at Emory University in Atlanta. "It's almost as if we will have to redraw the (evolutionary) tree if these discoveries keep coming out."

Salvador Moya-Sola of the Miguel Crusafont Institute of Paleontology in Barcelona, Spain, and his colleagues describe the species, which they have named Pierolapithecus catalaunicus, in the November 19 issue of the journal Science.

"The importance of this new fossil is that for the first time all the key areas that define modern great apes are well-preserved," Moya-Sola said in a statement. Fossils of apes are extremely rare and do not fossilize well because they are often in forests, where bones tend to decay.

Yet de Waal cautioned against making conclusions about whether this new fossil is a route on the road to human evolution.

"Its spectacular to have new information on this," he said. "But (human evolution) is not a straight line, it's has an enormous number of side branches."

Researchers think great apes diverged from lesser apes, which are gibbons and siamangs, about 11 million to 16 million years ago. Fossils from that geological epoch, called the middle Miocene, are fairly rare. Scientists believe humans diverged from the living great apes about 6 million years ago.

The searchers say it could be that Pierolapithecus is not itself the last common ancestor of the great apes, but rather a close relative of that animal.

Study of the fossilized bones suggest Pierolapithecus was a tree climber, with a stiff lower spine, and a specially adapted rib cage and wrist bones. However, its short fingers suggest it did not do a lot of hanging from branches.

The bones were found near Barcelona after a bulldozer clearing land at a dig site turned up a tooth. Study of the fossils suggests the ape was male, weighed about 75 pounds, and ate fruit.

And while the bones were found in Spain, Moya-Sola suspects the species also lived in Africa.

Only four species of great apes -- orangutans, bonobos, gorillas and chimpanzees -- exist today. All of them are endangered due to hunting and habitat loss.

Link

Cool find.

So hey, lets make the headline... the thing everyone will remember...


I mean, no new species discovered or raw data on what was found or could be the elephant ape, but gotta throw in that subtile insinuation on Creationism's for the unenlightened non-leets. Could be, may be, might be... so lets just say it in the headline.


lol... ummm... I need a mirror Probably look like that atm...

Well the more we find, the more we leran about ourselves, where we came from and the world around us.
This is another gerat discovery which will hopefully allow us to increase our knowledge even further!

'Original' great ape discovered
By Paul Rincon
BBC News science reporter


Scientists have unearthed remains of a primate that could have been ancestral not only to humans but to all great apes, including chimps and gorillas.
The partial skeleton of this 13-million-year-old "missing link" was found by palaeontologists working at a dig site near Barcelona in Spain.

Details of the sensational discovery appear in Science magazine.

The new specimen was probably male, a fruit-eater and was slightly smaller than a chimpanzee, researchers say.


Palaeontologists were just getting started at the dig when a bulldozer churned up a tooth.
Further investigation yielded one of the most complete ape skeletons known from the Miocene Epoch (about 22 to 5.5 million years ago).

Salvador Moyà-Solà of the Miquel Crusafont Institute of Palaeontology in Barcelona and colleagues subsequently found parts of the skull, ribcage, spine, hands and feet, along with other bones.

They have assigned it to an entirely new family and species: Pierolapithecus catalaunicus .

Monkey business

Great apes are thought - on the basis of genetic and other evidence - to have separated from another primate group known as the lesser apes some time between 11 and 16 million years ago (The lesser apes include gibbons and siamang).

It is fascinating, therefore, for a specimen like Pierolapithecus to turn up right in this window.

Scientists think the creature lived after the lesser apes went their own evolutionary way, but before the great apes began their own diversification into different forms such as orang-utans, gorillas, chimps and, of course, humans.

" Pierolapithecus probably is, or is very close to, the last common ancestor of great apes and humans," said Professor Moyà-Solà.


The new ape's ribcage, lower spine and wrist display signs of specialised climbing abilities that link it with modern great apes, say the researchers.
The overall orthograde - or upright - body design of this animal and modern-day great apes is thought to be an adaptation to vertical climbing and suspending the body from branches.

The Miocene ape fossil record is patchy; so finding such a complete fossil from this time period is unprecedented.

"It's very impressive because of its completeness," David Begun, professor of palaeoanthropology at the University of Toronto, Canada, told the BBC News website.

"I think the authors are right that it fills a gap between the first apes to arrive in Europe and the fossil apes that more closely resemble those living today."

Planet of the apes

Other scientists working on fossil apes were delighted by the discovery. But not all were convinced by the conclusions drawn by the Spanish researchers.

Professor Begun considers it unlikely that Pierolapithecus was ancestral to orang-utans.

"I haven't seen the original fossils. But there are four or five important features of the face, in particular, that seem to be closer to African apes," he explained.

"To me the possibility exists that it is already on the evolutionary line to African apes and humans."


Professor David Pilbeam, director of the Peadbody Museum in Cambridge, US, was even more sceptical about the relationship of Pierolapithecus to modern great apes: "To me it's a very long stretch to link this to any of the living apes," he told the BBC News website.
"I think it's unlikely that you would find relatives of the apes that live today in equatorial Africa and Asia up in Europe.

"But it's interesting in that it appears to show some adaptations towards having a trunk that's upright because it's suspending itself [from branches].

"It also has some features that show quadrupedal (four-legged) behaviour. Not quadrupedal in the way chimps or gorillas are, but more in the way that monkeys are - putting their fingers down flat," he explained.

During the Miocene, Earth really was the planet of the apes.

As many as 100 different ape species roamed the Old World, from France to China in Eurasia and from Kenya to Namibia in Africa.


Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/sci/tech/4014351.stm