2023-10-16 21:00:13
A new study led by scientists from the American Museum of Natural History, Brooklyn College, and the Miquel Crusafont Catalan Institute of Paleontology has managed to reconstruct the well-preserved but highly damaged skull of a great species of ape that lived about 12 million years ago. , Pierolapithecus catalaunicus, which is crucial to understanding human evolution. The researchers describe their findings in a paper just published in ‘Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences‘.
Pierolapithecus catalaunicus, first described in 2004 in northeastern Spain, belonged to a diverse group of ape species, now extinct, that lived in Europe between 15 and 7 million years ago. In paleontology, the characteristics of the skull and teeth are extremely important to establish the evolutionary relationships between different fossil species, and finding this type of material together with the bones of the rest of the skeleton allows scientists not only to precisely locate the species in the hominid family tree, but also learn more about the biology of the animal and its adaptation to the environment that surrounded it.
Previous work carried out with remains of Pierolapithecus suggest that a vertical body design already existed prior to the adaptations that allowed our distant ancestors to hang from tree branches and move between them. However, debate persists over the evolutionary place of the species, in part due to damage to the skull.
The biggest problem is that the fossil record is fragmentary, and many specimens are incomplete and distorted, explains study co-author Ashley Hammond, making it difficult to reach a consensus on the evolutionary relationships of the key fossil apes that are essential to understanding so much. to the monkey as to human evolution.
To try to resolve these questions, researchers used CT scans to virtually reconstruct the skull of Pierolapithecus, compare it with other primate species and then model the evolution of key features of the ape’s facial structure. In this way, they discovered that Pierolapithecus It shares similarities in general facial shape and size with great apes, both fossilized and living, but also has distinct facial features not found in other Middle Miocene apes. The results are consistent with the idea that this species represents one of the first members of the great apes and the human family.
Another conclusion of the study is that the skull of Pierolapithecus It is closer in shape and size to the common ancestor from which both today’s great apes and humans evolved.
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