Extinct lemur skull unveiled by scientists
Non-white parts of the skull indicate the fragments added to the 1899 find
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Tuesday, 29, Jul 2008 12:01
Scientists have pieced together separate skull fragments to create the first images of an extinct lemur's skull.
Hadropithecus stenognathus was a lemur with a deep jaw, flat face and a surprisingly large body about as big as a large male baboon.
The reconstruction of a complete image of its skull required the combination of data from skull fragments kept in Austria's capital Vienna, originally discovered in 1899, and those uncovered at the same location in Madagascar by US scientists over 100 years later.
CT scans of the fossilised pieces, conducted separately and combined together for the first time, show a three-dimensional print of the lemur species.
Timothy Ryan of Penn University said the work had been "very much a modern research story".
"We did all the work with the help of computers and neither all of the scientists nor all of the specimens were ever in the same room," he said.
Details of the research will be published in this week's edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal.
Scientists are now seeking to establish what constituted Hadropithecus' main diet.
Big chewing muscles and 'microwear' scratching on the enamel of the Hadropithecus teeth suggest it ate hard foods like nuts and seeds, but analysis of nitrogen and carbon isotopes in the bones of other specimens suggests otherwise.
Current research is focusing on whether the microwear pattern could be created by grit clinging to plants in Madagascar.