Almost 20 years on from its headline-making discovery as the most ancient Old World monkey skull ever discovered, the famous 15-million-year-old fossil has made the news once again.
Using a combination of sophisticated imaging techniques, scientists have managed to reconstruct the specimen’s brain, which revealed some unexpected features. Not only was it far smaller than anticipated, but it was surprisingly wrinkly; significantly more so than would have been expected for its modest size.
That’s an exciting find, because it adds weight to the idea that size does not necessarily have to evolve before complexity when it comes to the brains of primates, meaning the two can evolve independently. The results have been published in Nature Communications (open access).
Old World monkeys, as the name suggests, are those from the Old World, meaning Africa and Asia. This particular specimen, belonging to Victoriapithecus, holds great scientific importance because it’s the only complete skull that scientists have so far managed to find for early cercopithecoids, the group comprising the Old World monkeys. It’s also the oldest, and fossils from this period are extremely scarce, so it’s key to our understanding of how their brains changed over time.