Fossils of an ancient ape that lived in Turkey around 8.7 million years ago is challenging accepted ideas about human origins. The fossils include skull bones, jaws and teeth of both males and females. This new ape has been named Anadoluvius turkae. The material was excavated from the Çorakyerler fossil locality near Çankırı in northern Turkey, about 60 miles (100 km) northeast of the country’s capital, Ankara. Assigned to the subfamily Homininae, the genus name is from “Anadolu” the modern Turkish word for the Anatolia region.

The discovery of A. turkae lends support to the hypothesis that the Homininae first evolved in Europe before migrating to Africa 7–9 million years ago.

The subfamily Homininae consists of two tribes. The Hominini which includes modern humans and their extinct relatives along with the subtribe Panina which consists of bonobos and chimpanzees. In addition, there is the Gorillini tribe (gorillas).

Anadoluvius turkae

The researchers suggest that hominines (members of the Homininae tribe), not only evolved in western and central Europe but spent over five million years evolving there and spreading to the eastern Mediterranean. These apes eventually dispersed into Africa, probably as a result of a drying climate reducing the amount of forest habitat in the eastern Mediterranean.

The well-preserved fossils including an Anadoluvius cranium permitted the scientists to conduct a detailed analysis of character attributes in the fossil record. This new study supports the hypothesis that hominines originated in Europe and dispersed into Africa along with many other mammals between 9 and 7 million years ago (Tortonian stage of the Miocene Epoch).

Anadoluvius turkae was about the size of a modern chimpanzee. Anadoluvius probably weighed around 50-60 kilograms. It inhabited dry forested habitats and probably spent a lot of time on the ground rather than in the trees.

More Miocene Homininae Fossils

The researchers consisting of scientists from Ankara University, Pamukkale University and the Ege University Faculty of Science (Turkey), along with colleagues from the Naturalis Biodiversity Centre (Holland) and the University of Toronto (Canada) hope to find more fossils.

A spokesperson from Everything Dinosaur commented:

“Further fossil discoveries will help to clarify the evolutionary origins of the Homininae. More fossils from Africa and Europe will help palaeontologists to outline the geographical distribution of our ancient ancestors.”

Everything Dinosaur acknowledges the assistance of the Media Relations team at the University of Toronto (Canada) in the compilation of this article.

The scientific paper: “A new ape from Türkiye and the radiation of late Miocene hominines” by Ayla Sevim-Erol, D. R. Begun, Ç. Sönmez Sözer, S. Mayda, L. W. van den Hoek Ostende, R. M. G. Martin and M. Cihat Alçiçek published in Communications Biology.

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Scientists have described a new species of prehistoric bat based on the oldest bat fossils ever discovered. The new bat species has been named Icaronycteris gunnelli and it flew in the skies above Wyoming approximately 52 million years ago.

The study describing these remarkable fossil finds was published earlier this summer in the academic journal PLOS One.

Icaronycteris gunnelli

The authors at the American Museum of Natural History (New York) in collaboration with the Naturalis Biodiversity Centre in the Netherlands, hypothesise that bats diversified rapidly during the early Cenozoic.

There are more than 1,460 extant species of bats found in nearly every part of the world, with the exception of the polar regions and a few isolated islands. These fossils from the Green River Formation of Wyoming suggest that these mammals were geographically widespread by the early Eocene.

Bat fossils had been found in these strata over the last sixty years or so. However, they were all thought to represent the same two taxa. The two fossil bat taxa that have been described previously from the Green River Formation are Icaronycteris index (Jepsen, 1966) and Onychonycteris finneyi (Simmons et al, 2008).

Detailed Study

Scientists from the Naturalis Biodiversity Center started looking closely at Icaronycteris index by collecting measurements and other data from museum specimens. This more detailed study they suspected, would lead to new taxa being identified.

Although there are fossil bat teeth from Asia that are slightly older, the two I. gunnelli fossils represent the oldest bat skeletons ever found.

Arvid Aase, park manager and curator at the Fossil Butte National Monument, in Wyoming commented;

“The Fossil Lake deposits of the Green River Formation are simply amazing because the conditions that created the paper-thin limestone layers also preserved nearly everything that settled to the lake’s bottom. One of these bat specimens was found lower in the section than all other bats, making this species older than any of the other bat species recovered from this deposit.”

While the I. gunnelli skeletons are the oldest bat fossils from this site, they are not the most primitive, supporting the idea that Green River bats evolved separately from other Eocene bats around the world.

Everything Dinosaur acknowledges the assistance of a media release from the American Museum of Natural History in the compilation of this article.

The scientific paper: “The oldest known bat skeletons and their implications for Eocene chiropteran diversification” by Tim B. Rietbergen, Lars W. van den Hoek Ostende, Arvid Aase, Matthew F. Jones, Edward D. Medeiros and Nancy B. Simmons published in PLOS One.

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An enormous prehistoric whale named Perucetus colossus might be the heaviest vertebrate to have ever lived. Previously, the heaviest animal known to science was the blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus). These whales can weigh up to 190 tonnes. The newly described P. colossus is estimated to have weighed between 85 and 340 tonnes. Researchers writing in the academic journal “Nature” postulate that this animal pushes extreme size in cetaceans to a much earlier phase in their evolutionary development.

Perucetus colossus

Fossils of this leviathan were discovered in the desert on the southern coast of Peru. Palaeontologist Mario Urbina spent decades painstakingly looking for fossils. In 2010, he made an exceptional discovery. Other field team members were puzzled when photographs of the unusual objects jutting out of the 39-million-year-old sediments were examined.

These huge and odd-shaped objects were vertebrae from an immense skeleton. Each bone weighed over a hundred kilograms and four ribs found in association with the thirteen vertebrae measured approximately 1.4 metres in length. Several expeditions had to be organised to excavate and remove the colossal fossils from the remote location.

A New Species of Basilosaurid Whale

The remarkable fossils are now part of the vertebrate collection housed at the Museo de Historia Natural, Universidad Nacional Mayor San Marcos in Peru. Perucetus has been assigned to Basilosauridae family. These whales were the earliest cetaceans to fully transition to an aquatic lifestyle. Basilosaurids are known from the early Eocene to the late Eocene and were geographically widespread.

Perhaps the most famous of all these ancient whales is Basilosaurus. It was an apex predator and some species could have reached lengths of twenty metres or so, approximately the same length as Perucetus colossus, but Basilosaurus was much lighter.

Picture credit: Everything Dinosaur

The picture above depicts a Basilosaurus. Fossils indicate that Basilosaurus was much more slender and serpent-like when compared to the newly described Perucetus. The drawing is based on the CollectA Basilosaurus replica.

To view the not-to-scale CollectA model range: CollectA Age of Dinosaurs Popular Models.

The World’s Heaviest Animal

No other known basilosaurid had such massive bones. An international team of scientists including Olivier Lambert, a palaeontologist at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences surface-scanned the preserved bones to measure their volume. Cores were taken from one dorsal vertebra and a rib to permit an assessment of bone density and structure. Comparisons with extant whales and other extinct basilosaurids were then made.

The twenty-metre-long skeleton of the Perucetus was estimated to be two to three times heavier than the blue whale skeleton called Hope exhibited in the Hintze Hall of the London Natural History Museum. To reconstruct the body mass of Perucetus, the authors used the ratio of soft tissue to skeleton mass known in living marine mammals. With estimates ranging from 85 to 340 tonnes, the mass of Perucetus colossus falls in or exceeds the distribution of the blue whale.

Adapted to a Shallow Water Marine Environment

The scientists postulate that Perucetus was adapted to a shallow water marine environment. The tremendous weight of this cetacean, perhaps as heavy as fifty African elephants, was partly due to modifications observed in the fossil bones. The outer portions of the bones were packed out with additional bone mass, giving them a bloated appearance (pachyostosis). The internal cavities were filled with compact bone (osteosclerosis). These two anatomical traits increased the weight of the skeleton.

Co-author of the study Olivier Lambert commented:

“These modifications are not pathological, but well known in many aquatic mammals (such as manatees) and extinct reptiles who mostly lived in shallow coastal waters. The extra weight helps these animals regulate their buoyancy and trim underwater. A stable position in the water may have been useful when foraging for crustaceans, demersal fish and molluscs along the seafloor. Such a large and heavy animal may also have been able to counteract waves in high-energy waters.”

In extant cetaceans, who can dive at much greater depth and live far offshore, the bone structure is much lighter.

Evidence of Early Gigantism

It had been thought that gigantism in baleen whales was a relatively recent development in cetacean evolution. The first huge filter-feeding whales were thought to have evolved around 5 million years ago (early Pliocene Epoch). However, the discovery of Perucetus colossus pushes back the evolution of gigantism in prehistoric whales to the Eocene.

Olivier Lambert added:

“Discovering a truly giant species such as Perucetus who is affected by strong bone mass increase changes our understanding of whale evolution. Gigantic body masses have been reached 30 million years before previously assumed, and in a coastal context.”

Everything Dinosaur acknowledges the assistance of a media release from the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in the compilation of this article.

The scientific paper: “A heavyweight early whale pushes the boundaries of vertebrate morphology” by Giovanni Bianucci, Olivier Lambert, Mario Urbina, Marco Merella, Alberto Collareta, Rebecca Bennion, Rodolfo Salas-Gismondi, Aldo Benites-Palomino, Klaas Post, Christian de Muizon, Giulia Bosio, Claudio Di Celma, Elisa Malinverno, Pietro Paolo Pierantoni, Igor Maria Villa and Eli Amson published in Nature.

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