Anthropologist Assembles And Copies Skeleton Of Extinct Lemur

Scientists in Madagascar, at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and the Vienna Natural History Museum and at the University of Massachusetts Amherst now have a nearly complete skeleton of a rare species of extinct lemur to study thanks to a century-long discovery and reconstruction effort. Collecting and casting of the lemur bones and assembling them into a near complete skeleton capped off a process that began in 1899 in the Andrahomana Cave in southeastern Madagascar. It began with a little known explorer named Franz Sikora who unearthed an incomplete skull of the subadult lemur, along with specimens belonging to an infant, juvenile and adult in that cave. Sikora sent the specimens to Vienna where they were described by Lorenz von Liburnau, who named the species "Hadropithecus stenognathus." "Hadropithecus" was a large male baboon-sized lemur with a flat face and a long tail. It would have spent a lot of time on the ground, and it lived several thousand years ago along the southern and western shores of Madagascar, as well as at some interior sites. In 2003, a team of scientists, including Godfrey, revisited the Andrahomana Cave and found bones and bone fragments from the same animal found in the 1899 expedition, Godfrey says. Among them were pieces of frontal bone (parts of the eye sockets), teeth and many other bones that belong to Sikora's subadult "Hadropithecus." Alan Walker at Pennsylvania State University noticed that association and launched an effort to reconstruct the whole skull digitally, using the pieces found in 1899 and the other pieces found in 2003. This reconstruction was recently published in the Aug. 5 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/11/081114201106.htm