Louis Leakey, John Napier and the history of Proconsul

Abstract

The first Proconsul fossil was found in 1927, but it was not until 1942 that Louis Leakey was able to devote much time to studying the Miocene. An enormous wealth of plant and animal fossils was found by the British Kenya Miocene Expeditions between 1947–1950. Accounts of the fauna were published by the British Museum in a new series of monographs. The first, by Sir Wilfrid LeGros Clark and Louis Leakey (1951), was devoted to the hominoids and included an account of the famous 1948 skull. Not much effort was devoted at first to the few post-cranial remains that were thought to belong to Proconsul. This situation changed when Le Gros Clark invited John Napier to study the 1950 partial skeleton (KNM-RU 2036). Napier's monograph, with its contribution by P.R. Davis on four foot bones (Napier & Davis, 1959) was in the forefront of the paleobiological approach to primate paleontology, by beginning the study of the fossil with what was then known about modern primate locomotion and morphology. Several expeditions since then have added to the wealth of Proconsul specimens from Rusinga. Many isolated specimens show us that the size variation we see is sufficiently great that two species have to be present. It remains to be demonstrated, however, what these two species should be called. The larger is P. nyanzae, of which the 1948 skull may possibl be a female, and the smaller is almost certainly not P. africanus. More parts of the KNM-RU 2036 skeleton have been discovered, both in the old Kenya Museum collections and at the site on Rusinga. Parts of at least nine individuals were found in 1984 at Kaswanga. Practically every body part is represented, including a natural cast of some Proconsul soft tissue. Our ideas about Proconsul have changed considerably since the 1950s, but not all of this is due to the dramatic increase in the number of fossils. In large part it is due to the development of primate paleobiology, a field which John Napier helped start.