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/ International News / 2007 / August 2007 / August 8, 2007 Ancient ape that could both swing like orang-utan and walk like gorilla |
Palaeontologists have discovered a 9.5 million year old fossil of an ape that had hands that allowed them to swing from branches as well as walk along them on all fours.
London, Aug 8 : Palaeontologists have discovered a 9.5 million year old fossil of an ape that had hands that allowed them to swing from branches as well as walk along them on all fours.
All primate fingers have a bone called the metacarpal at their base. This is topped off by bones called phalanges: two in the thumb, three in each of the other fingers.
In orang-utans, both metacarpals and phalanges are extended, allowing them to grasp branches and climb trees. Ground-dwelling apes like gorillas have shorter fingers as an adaptation to walking on their knuckles.
However, the Hispanopithecus laietanus had extended phalanges and short metacarpals. These not only allowed them to hang from tree branches like orang-utans, but also walk on all fours along the larger branches with the palms flat on the surface.
Sergio Almécija at Barcelona Independent University in Spain, who led the research team that studied the fossil, said the Hispanopithecus was also likely to have had a unique arrangement of ligaments in its fingers that allowed it to pull its fingers quite far back.
These adaptations would have allowed it to move not only by grasping and swinging, but also by walking on its palms, he said.
However, scientists are not clear about the exact role that Hispanopithecus played in the evolution of modern apes.
During the Miocene period, from 23 to 5 million years ago, apes began diversifying into the modern forms of today. As such, Hispanopithecus could either have been an ancestor of modern orang-utans, or equally an evolutionary dead end, said C. Owen Lovejoy of Kent State University in Kent, Ohio, US.
"What did modern apes do? Did they go through a stage like Hispanopithecus, or did they elongate everything at the same time? During the Miocene, apes were much more diverse than they are now. Apes were just everywhere...and almost all of them have disappeared," he said.
The study appears in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, reports New Scientist.
ANI
