Orrorin praegens

Orrorin praegens is an extinct species of great ape in the genus Orrorin, within the tribe Hominini, known from the Pliocene Mabaget Formation of Kenya. It rests on the Tabarin mandible, specimen KNM-TH 13150, discovered in the early 1980s, which was first described by Ward in 1985 and was initially called Homo antiquus praegens by Ferguson in 1989. The mandible had earlier been classified within Ardipithecus ramidus and as Praeanthropus praegens. Several more remains were collected between 2005 and 2011 by the Franco-Kenyan Kenya Palaeontology Expedition, and in 2022 Pickford and colleagues classified them with the Tabarin mandible as separate from Homo and placed them in Orrorin as a second species beside the type species O. tugenensis. The epithet means roughly group of people who came before.