Word: boisei
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Dates: during 1986-1986
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...that's a big monkey, thought Paleontologist Alan Walker as he plucked the skull fragment from a gully west of Kenya's Lake Turkana. But that was no monkey. The bone belonged to a 2.5 million-year-old ape-man called Australopithecus boisei. The discovery surprised Walker, since he and most anthropologists believed the boisei species had evolved 2.2 million years ago. "This is probably more significant than almost anything we've had for a good number of years," says Anthropologist Richard Leakey, one of Walker's coauthors of a report about the fossil in last week's issue...
...fossil record had also apparently shown that the australopithecines evolved in an orderly way: first came afarensis, followed by africanus, then robustus and boisei. But the age and form of WT 17000 convinced Leakey and Walker that the lineage was not simple after all. Boisei did not descend from robustus, and probably not even from afarensis...