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 Moyą-Solą 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 genus and species: Pierolapithecus catalaunicus. 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.
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