Internal cranial anatomy of the type specimen of Pan paniscus and available data for study

Abstract

On December 6, 1927, the Congo Museum (now Royal Museum for Central Africa, Tervuren, Belgium) received the cranium, mandible, and skin of an adult female chimpanzee collected in the Congo River Basin, about 30 km south of Befale, a town located south of the upper Maringa River, a confluent of the Lulonga, itself a confluent of the Congo River (once Zaire River), in present day Democratic Republic of Congo. This specimen (registered # 9338) was first classified as the type of Pan satyrus paniscus, a subspecies of the chimpanzee (Schwarz, 1929). Soon after this publication the taxon was elevated to species rank, calling it Pan paniscus, in the first major study on the pygmy chimpanzee (Coolidge, 1933). Detailed account of the history of the recognition of Pan paniscus as a new species can be found in Coolidge (1984), Thys van den Audenaerde (1984), Thompson (2001), and Herzfeld (2005). Currently, 52 postcranial skeletons specimens and 188 skulls (crania plus mandible) of Pan paniscus are housed in the Royal Museum for Central Africa. In the last 20 years, the development of new methodologies (e.g., geometric morphometrics and imaging facilities, among