Proconsul (genus)
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Conservation status: Fossil Miocene (27-17 MYA)
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Proconsul africanus |
Proconsul was an early genus of primates that existed from 27 to 17 million years ago during the Miocene epoch, first in Kenya, and restricted to Africa. There were at least 4 species ranging in size from 22-84 lbs. They inhabited rainforests.
They had a mixture of Old World monkey and ape characteristics, so their placement in the ape superfamily Hominoidea is tentative; some scientists place Proconsul outside of Hominoidea, before the split of the apes and Old World monkeys. If Proconsul is not an ape, then it would be somewhat closely related to Aegyptopithecus.
Proconsul's monkey-like features include thin tooth enamel, a light build with a narrow chest and short forelimbs, and an arboreal quadrupedal lifestyle. Its ape-like features are its lack of a tail, ape-like elbows, and a slightly larger brain relative to body size. The first specimen, a partial jaw discovered in 1909 by a gold prospector at Koru, near Kisumu in western Kenya, was also the oldest fossil hominoid known until recently, and the first fossil mammal ever found in sub-Saharan Africa.
At the time of the discovery of Proconsul, the London Zoo had a popular chimpanzee named Consul; the fact that the Miocene genus was a "pre-chimp" or the next thing to it supposedly inspired the generic name (Howell, 1965).
