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''Proconsul africanus'' is an ape which lived from about 23 to 14 millions years ago during the Miocene epoch. It was a fruit eater and had a brain larger than a monkey, although probably not as large as a modern ape.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Proconsul africanus )〕 It was named by paleontologist Arthur Hopwood in 1933 after chimpanzees all called Consul, which performed human like circus acts, such as riding a bicycle and playing the piano, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Other species of the genus Proconsul have since been discovered. ==Discovery== The Leakey expedition of 1947–1948 to Rusinga Island in Lake Victoria uncovered more species of Proconsul. Louis Leakey made an especially complete find of ''Proconsul'' there in 1948, which was for a number of decades labeled ''africanus'', but was reclassified as ''heseloni'' in 1993 by Alan Walker. In 1951 Leakey and Le Gros Clark placed Hopwood's ''Xenopithecus koruensis'' ("strange ape from Koru, Kenya") with africanus. In 1951 also T. Whitworth found more Proconsul on Rusinga, which he considered ''africanus'', but they were lumped with 1992 finds by Walker to form ''heseloni''. The 18-million-year-old fossil species has been considered a possible ancestor of both great and lesser apes, and of humans. The paleontologist Louis Leakey, who was one of the foremost fossil-hunters of the 20th century and a champion of evolution, said: Leakey changed his mind a few times about the exact classification of Proconsul, as did most other palaeontologists. Opinion currently favors a position between the monkeys and the apes. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Proconsul africanus」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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