Meganthropus palaeojavanicus

Meganthropus palaeojavanicus is the type species of Meganthropus, an extinct genus of pongine hominid ape known from the Pleistocene of Indonesia. It is known from large jaw and skull fragments and several isolated teeth found at the Sangiran site near Surakarta in Central Java. The first fossil was a jaw fragment found in 1941 by Gustav von Koenigswald and described by Franz Weidenreich in 1945, who was struck by its size, because it was the largest hominid jaw known at the time. The taxonomic history is long and convoluted: for a long time the name was treated as invalid and used informally for the fossils, most palaeoanthropologists considered them part of the variation of Homo erectus, others proposed the names Homo palaeojavanicus or Australopithecus palaeojavanicus, and in 2019 a study of tooth morphology found Meganthropus a valid genus of non-hominin hominid ape, most closely related to Lufengpithecus.