A 20-million-year-old ape skull was discovered in northeastern Uganda, Discovery News reported today. Ugandan and French paleontologists think it can shed light on East Africa’s evolutionary history.
The skull belongs to a remote cousin of today’s great apes, called the Ugandapithecus Major, and is the first skull ever found for this species named in 1950 . Paleontologists discovered it while they were searching for fossils in an extinct volcano in Karamoja that erupted 20 million years ago, and preserved the fossil. The Daily Monitor reported that it’s the earliest modern-sized ape skull ever found.
Agnes Akiror, the state minister for tourism, said in a press conference that the discovery is of “great significance to our country and to all paleontologist researchers.” A cast of the skull will be displayed at a new museum in Moroto that will open in a few months. The skull will be sent to Paris for further study, and then returned to Uganda for preservation in a vault, according to the paleontologist team.
Scientists believe the ape was a tree-climbing herbivore that died at the age of ten, BBC News reported.
