You're looking at an amazingly rare piece of history. This is the oldest gibbon fossil yet discovered, a find that helps fill a long-elusive gap in the evolutionary history of apes. It is the jaw of a baby from a species named Yuanmoupithecus xiaoyuan.
Living gibbons are found throughout tropical Asia from northeastern India to Indonesia, but very few of their fossils have ever been found.
“Hylobatids fossil remains are very rare, and most specimens are isolated teeth and fragmentary jaw bones found in cave sites in southern China and southeast Asia dating back no more than 2 million years ago,” explains Terry Harrison, a professor of anthropology at New York University, emeritus member of The Leakey Foundation’s Scientific Executive Committee, and one of the authors of the 2022 paper describing the find. “This new find extends the fossil record of hylobatids back to 7 to 8 million years ago and, more specifically, enhances our understanding of the evolution of this family of apes.”
The fossil, discovered in the Yuanmou area of Yunnan Province in southwestern China, is of a small ape called Yuanmoupithecus xiaoyuan. The analysis, which included Xueping Ji of the Kunming Institute of Zoology and the lead author of the study, focused on the teeth and cranial specimens of Yuanmoupithecus, including an upper jaw of an infant that was less than two years old when it died.
1: Image courtesy of Terry Harrison, NYU’s Department of Anthropology.
2: A buff-cheeked gibbon swings from a branch with her infant clinging to her. Photo by Ramon Vloon on Unsplash
3: An excavation near the village of Leilao in Yunnan, one of the locations where Yuanmoupithecus remains have been found. Image courtesy of Terry Harrison
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