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 Scientists on Thursday announced the discovery in Catalonia of
fossil remains of a small, fruit-eating female ape that lived in a
warm, wet forested region teeming with animals including elephant
relatives, rhinos and saber-toothed predators.
They gave the ape, weighing 9-11 pounds (4-5 kg), the scientific
name Pliobates cataloniae and the nickname "Laia."
"There is no living primate like Pliobates, which exhibits a unique
combination of modern ape-like features with other, more primitive
ones," said paleobiologist David Alba of the Catalan Institute of
Paleontology near Barcelona.
"We can imagine a small ape, like the smallest living gibbons, with
a gibbon-like appearance regarding the cranium but with different
body proportions: less elongated arms and hands."
 Alba said Pliobates, which lived during the Miocene epoch, moved
through the forest canopy differently than today's gibbons, using
slow and cautious climbing, like a loris, a more primitive primate,
while sometimes hanging below branches.
The remains include 70 bones or bone fragments including a skull
exceptionally complete for a primate from that time.
Its teeth look primitive compared to today's apes including both the
small-bodied "lesser apes" like gibbons and siamangs and the
larger-bodied "great apes" like orangutans, gorillas and
chimpanzees.
Its skull exhibits features including overall shape similar to
today's apes, although it more closely resembles gibbons than great
apes. Its elbow and wrist are similar to today's apes. But the
external bony ear is more primitive than in living apes and monkeys.
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"Pliobates suggests that small-bodied apes played a much more
important role in the origin of extant apes than previously
recognized, and that their last common ancestor, in several
respects, skull shape and body size, might have been more
gibbon-like than previously thought," Alba said.
Gibbons are small, arboreal apes from rainforests in parts of Asia.
Alba said the evolutionary divergence of gibbons and great apes
occurred between 20 and 15 million years ago, meaning Pliobates
because of its age cannot be the last common ancestor of today's
apes and the human lineage.
But Pliobates may have descended from an ape that lived just before
this evolutionary split. "As a result, Pliobates gives us insight as
to how this common ancestor would have been," Alba said.
The research appears in the journal Science.
(Reporting by Will Dunham; Editing by Sandra Maler)
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