Dryopithecus crusafonti
| Dryopithecus crusafonti | ||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Temporal occurrence | ||||||||||||
| late Miocene | ||||||||||||
| by 10 million years | ||||||||||||
| Locations | ||||||||||||
| Systematics | ||||||||||||
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| Scientific name | ||||||||||||
| Dryopithecus crusafonti | ||||||||||||
| Begun , 1992 | ||||||||||||
Dryopithecus crusafonti is an extinct species of Old World monkey from the genus Dryopithecus , which occurred around 10 million years ago during the late Miocene in northern Spain .
Naming
Dryopithecus is an artificial word . The name of the genus is derived from Greek: drys = "oak" and πίθηκος, pronounced in ancient Greek píthēkos = "monkey", thus means "monkey from the oak forest". The epithet crusafonti honors the Spanish vertebrate paleontologist Miquel Crusafont i Pairó (1910–1983). The name of the genus was chosen by Édouard Armand Lartet in 1856 because the first fossil attributed to the genus was found in France together with remains of oaks .
Initial description
The holotype of Dryopithecus crusafonti in the first description by David Begun was a “crushed” left upper jaw fragment with preserved canine , preserved 3rd premolar and preserved 1st and 2nd molar (archive number IPS 1798/1799) from the Vallés Penedés - Basin, Province of Barcelona , kept at the Institut de Paleontologia M. Crusafont in Sabadell . In addition, more than a dozen individual teeth of the newly defined type were assigned in the first description, which had already been recorded in catalogs between 1969 and 1973. The species was interpreted as belonging to the human species (Hominoidea) in the first description , but this - like the assignment of the entire genus Dryopithecus - is controversial in specialist circles.
According to the first description, the dentition of Dryopithecus crusafonti differs from Dryopithecus fontani as well as from Dryopithecus laietanus , both of which are also known from Spanish sources and are also primarily distinguished by the size of their teeth. Dryopithecus crusafonti has, among other things, particularly narrow canines with a high crown , and the 1st and 2nd molar are almost square when viewed from above. Like the other species of the genus Dryopithecus , Dryopithecus crusafonti differs from Kenyapithecus and Sivapithecus in that the enamel is much thinner and the size of the 1st and 2nd molar is almost identical; the species is most similar to Dryopithecus laietanus .
Due to the nature of the teeth, it was concluded in the first description that the animals mainly ate relatively soft food such as fruits and additionally on leaves and comparably hard vegetable food, without any specialization being demonstrable.
Locations and age
The fossils come from the Can Ponsic site in the province of Barcelona and from El Firal near La Seu d'Urgell . Its discoverer dated it in the first description of Dryopithecus crusafonti in 1992 using biostratigraphic analyzes in the European Land Mammal Mega-Zone MN9 around 10 million years ago.
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b David R. Begun : Dryopithecus crusafonti sp. nov., a New Miocene Hominoid Species From Can Ponsic (Northeastern Spain). In: American Journal of Physical Anthropology , Volume 87, 1992, pp. 291–309, doi : 10.1002 / ajpa.1330870306 , full text (PDF; 1.5 MB)