December 2023: Facial skull

Colobine of Pikermi Mesopithecus pentelici Wagner, 1839 Facial skull

Neogene: Upper Miocene, ca. 8 millionen years, Pikermi near Athens, Greece

In 1838, Dr. Andreas Wagner, an assistant at the Zoological State Collection in Munich, received a box containing fragments of fossil mammal bones from a Bavarian soldier. The soldier had collected them at the foot of Mount Pentelikon east of Athens during his posting in Greece under the Bavarian King Otto of Greece. Among other things, Wagner identified a toothed upper jaw of a small monkey and described it as the “most valuable and rarest object in the local collection of petrefacts”, a predecessor of today’s Bavarian State Collection of Palaeontology and Geology. His first published description and naming of the fossil appeared in 1839, joining the ranks of the first discoveries of extinct primates with other finds from Pakistan and France.

Wagner gave the monkey the name Mesopithecus pentelicus [ancient Greek “meso-” = “middle-“, “pithekos” for monkey], in reference to its relationship to modern monkeys and the place where it was found. The site is located near the village of Pikermi and is still one of the most important fossil sites in Europe, playing a key role in relative age dating. The first scientific excavation in the winter of 1852/53 was followed by many more, yielding a rich fauna consisting of gazelles, giraffes, rhinoceroses, horses, carnivores and primates among other vertebrates that may have lived in a savannah-like habitat.

The facial skull of M. pentelicus exhibited here was recovered in 1852/53. In addition to the very well preserved bones of the facial skull, many teeth of the upper jaw are present. The abrasion stage of the rearmost molar shows that these are fossils of an adult individual, and the small canine tooth at the very front indicates a female animal.

Mesopithecus was a small slender ape (colobine) that colonized Eurasia 8 million years ago. Before that, Eurasia was home only to the original relatives of modern apes (dryopithecids) and other small apes (pliopithecids), whose relationship to the apes living today has not been conclusively clarified. Until then, slender apes lived isolated in Africa for 20 million years and finally expanded their range with the conquest of Eurasia.