Ancient ape's bones unearthed in Spain

By The Baltimore Sun and The Washington Post

SCIENCE MAGAZINE / AP Pierolapithecus catalaunicus ate mostly fruit, climbed trees in an upright posture and, at 77 pounds, was a little smaller than a chimpanzee. The extinct species of great ape, shown here as depicted by an artist, lived about 13 million years ago and may have been the last ancestor humans shared with gorillas, chimpanzees and orangutans.

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Spanish researchers say they have found the remains of an extinct species of great ape that may have been the last ancestor humans shared with gorillas, chimpanzees and orangutans.

Scholars greeted the discovery as a spectacular find, bringing together 83 skull fragments, vertebrae, wrist bones, ribs and other bones from the same animal, a rarity in a field that often bases analyses on a few skull fragments and teeth.

Pierolapithecus catalaunicus ate mostly fruit, climbed trees in an upright posture and, at 77 pounds, was a little smaller than a chimpanzee.

Salvadore Moya-Sola and colleagues at the Miguel Crusafont Institute of Paleontology in Barcelona say the creature's ancestors probably came from Africa, where primates likely originated.

Archaeologists were only beginning to dig near Barcelona last year when a bulldozer churned up the tooth of what they believe was a male specimen that lived about 13 million years ago. They soon uncovered one of the most complete primate skeletons from the period ever found.

The world's great apes are thought to have evolved along with humans from a single ancestor that diverged from lesser apes, such as gibbons, millions of years ago. Modern humans didn't emerge until 100,000 years ago.

Fellow paleontologists were cautious about recognizing the fossil as a "missing link" between apes and humans. Instead, they described it as one species on an evolutionary path to great apes — but probably not the last one to be discovered.

"There are many, many links in the evolutionary chain, and this is one of them," said paleoanthropologist Carol Ward, of the University of Missouri at Columbia. "This may be the last common ancestor between great apes and humans, or not. More likely not. But that ancestor is going to be a lot like this fossil."

Other recent fossil discoveries also are contenders for the title of common ape ancestor. But the Spanish researchers say in today's issue of Science that theirs is the most likely candidate because it was shaped like apes that came later. It had a wide and flat rib cage, stiff spine, flexible wrists and shoulder blades on its back that were meant for easy upright climbing.

"It has a lot of the modern features in its face and its skeletal structures," Moya-Sola said.
 
Monkeys, by contrast, have more primitive skeletons, with narrower rib cages and shoulder blades on the sides of their ribs, a shoulder position similar to those in dogs.

Tracing the evolutionary process from apes to humans has proved difficult because the primate fossil record in Africa "just petered out" around 16 million years ago, only to pick up much later, when evidence of human evolution began to appear, Johns Hopkins University anthropologist Martin Teaford said.

In the interim, the primate record reappeared in Europe and Asia. Moya-Sola described the deposit outside Barcelona as a potentially rich source of fossils from the period when great apes evolved.

How this happened is still a subject of great controversy. Despite the new fossil, Moya-Sola said he was confident that the species originated in Africa, "a primate factory." Scientists "simply must find the fossils there."

Others are not so sure. The University of Toronto's David Begun said the new fossil lends credence to the view that the common ancestors evolved in Europe, then migrated back to Africa where they evolved into the African great apes and humans.