Formal description of the leg bone, which belongs to Sahelanthropus tchadensis, comes two decades after it was discovered.
. Their preliminary analysis concluded that the remains probably did not belong to a species that routinely walked upright.
In the paper now describing the femur, alongside the two arm bones, Guy’s team comes to the opposite conclusion. The team contends that more than a dozen features of the femur suggest that Toumaï’s kind walked on two feet, and the ape-like arm-bones suggest its species would also have been comfortable clambering in trees.
One thing the remains could help researchers to understand is how features such as hominin-like teeth evolved in a creature with ape-like arms well-adapted for tree life, says Madelaine Böhme, a palaeontologist at the University of Tübingen, Germany. She’s happy to see the arm and leg bones formally described, but would have liked to have begun such discussions 20 years ago when the remains were found. “This delay has lagged this field of science considerably,” she says.
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