A team of researchers reported a new species, Buronius manfredschmidi, that they estimated weighted about 20 pounds when it lived about 11 million years ago in what is now southern German, according to a study in PLOS One.
Finding a new species in and of itself is grounds for excitement. But in this case, the focus on size is just the closeup.
Pulling the camera back a bit reveals another level of significance. It turns out that B. manfredschmidi had hominid company. The small plant-eating ape almost certainly shared an ecosystem with the omnivorous bipedal ape Danuvius guggenmosi, according to the report. To say that is highly unusual would be an understatement.
“There are no fossil sites in the world that documents two hominids sharing an ecosystem,” says Madelaine Böhme of Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen, one of the site’s researchers and an author of the paper.
The researchers are ...
