What did the last common ancestor of living apes look like? That’s a difficult question to answer. Today’s apes – gibbons, orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees, and ourselves – are varied and specialized primates with relatively sparse fossil records. Depending on which paleoanthropologist you ask, then, the last common ancestor of today’s apes was either small and gibbon-like or more like a great ape, with gibbons hanging from a dwarfed branch of the family tree.

Not that Pliobates was one of our direct ancestors. Molecular evidence suggests that the split between gibbons and the rest of the apes occurred between 16 and 17 million years ago, long before this newly-named ape. Instead, Alba and coauthors write, Pliobates is more of a “persistent type”