Word: aegyptopithecus
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...have given rise to both apes and man. This ape's own ancestors seem likely to have lived in Africa as well. As Exhibit A, Duke University Anthropologist Elwyn Simons offered fossils, found near Cairo, of a tree-dwelling primate 30 million years old; Simons christened the creature Aegyptopithecus. Last week, however, a team of Burmese and American scientists created a stir in anthropological circles when they announced that they had found primate fossils in Burma that may be 40 million years old. That could plant man's roots in Southeast Asia...
...weighed roughly 30 Ibs. and somewhat resembled a rhesus monkey in body form and size. Their diet was probably fruits and other vegetation. As Savage says: "They were a sort of monkey with apelike teeth, bouncing through the trees." They could thus emerge as an earlier common ancestor than Aegyptopithecus of both apes and monkeys, and as a link back to such lower primates as lemurs and tarsiers. That might put them very near the start of anthropoid evolution; Ciochon speculates that they may have migrated into Africa via western Asia to evolve into later ancestors of early...
...Africa some 20 million years ago. But who, or what, preceded it? As far back as 1963, Simons, then at Yale, began uncovering in the wind-scoured Fayum desert region, southwest of Cairo, bones of a likely candidate: a small, fox-sized, tree-inhabiting primate, which he dubbed Aegyptopithecus (Egyptian Ape), that lived some 28 million to 30 million years ago. Returning there last fall, Simons and a colleague from the State University of New York at Stony Brook, John Fleagle, discovered the latest pieces in the jigsaw puzzle, four fragments of humeri, or upper-arm bones. Until...