Indopithecus
| Indopthecus giganteus Temporal range: Miocene
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| Genus: | †Indopithecus
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| Species: | †I. giganteus
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| †Indopithecus giganteus (Pilgrim, 1915)
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Indopithecus giganteus is an extinct species of large ape that lived in the late Miocene of the Siwalik Hills in northern India. Although frequently assigned to the more well-known genus Gigantopithecus, recent authors consider it to be a distinct genus in its own right.
Fossils and description
Indopithecus is known only from teeth and jawbones found in the late Miocene of the Siwalik Hills, India. Based on the slim fossil finds, it was a large, ground-dwelling herbivore that ate primarily bamboo and foliage. Despite the species name, it was approximately half the size of its Chinese relative, Gigantopithecus blacki.
Indopithecus giganteus was originally named as a species of the European ape Dryopithecus, D. giganteus, by Pilgrim (1915).[1] However, Lewis (1937) decided that Pilgrim's taxon was not congeneric with Dryopithecus and instead referred it to the co-eval ape Sivapithecus.[2] von Koenigswald (1950) recognized D. giganteus as being distinct from Dryopithecus and Sivapithecus and erected a new genus for it, Indopithecus ("ape from India").[3] Szalay and Delson (1979) found similarities of the Indopithecus material to Gigantopithecus and synonymized the two genera, treating I. giganteus as a referred species, G. giganteus.[4] However, recent authors, including Cameron (2001, 2003), Pickford (2010), Patnaik (2014), Begun (2015), and Welker et al. (2019), have argued that Indopithecus should be treated as generically distinct in its own right.[5][6][7][8][9][10]
References
- ^ Pilgrim, G. E. (1915): New Siwalik Primates and their bearing on the question of the evolution of man and the Anthropoidea. Records of the Geological Survey of India 45: 1–74.
- ^ Lewis, G. E., 1937. Taxonomic syllabus of Siwalik fossil anthropoids. Am. J. Sci., 34: 139–147.
- ^ Koenigswald, G. Von (1950): Bemerkungen zu Dryopithecus giganteus Pilgrim. Eclogae geologicae Helvetiae 42: 515–519.
- ^ Szalay, F. S. & Delson, E. 1979. Evolutionary history of the primates. Academic Press, New York.
- ^ Cameron, D. (2001): The taxonomic status of the Siwalik late Miocene hominid Indopithecus (= Gigantopithecus). Himalayan Geology, 22: 29–34.
- ^ Cameron, D. (2003). A functional and phylogenetic interpretation of the late Miocene Siwalik hominid Indopithecus and the Chinese Pleistocene hominid Gigantopithecus. Himalayan Geology 24: 19–28.
- ^ Martin Pickford, Additions to the Dehm collection of Siwalik hominoids, Pakistan: descriptions and interpretations , Zitteliana, p. 111-125, Munich, 2010, read online
- ^ Patnaik, R., Cerling, T., Uno, K., & Fleagle, J. (2014). Diet and habitat of Siwalik primates Indopithecus, Sivaladapis and Theropithecus. Annales Zoologici Fennici, 51(1/2), 123-142.
- ^ David R. Begun, 2015. The Real Planet of the Apes: A New Story of Human Origins , Princeton University Press.
- ^ Welker, F.; Ramos-Madrigal, J.; Kuhlwilm, M.; et al. (2019). "Enamel proteome shows that Gigantopithecus was an early diverging pongine". Nature. doi:10.1038/s41586-019-1728-8.
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