Victoriapithecus macinnesi

Victoriapithecus macinnesi was a monkey of the middle Miocene that lived roughly 17 to 15 million years ago in northern and eastern Africa. Field work on Maboko Island in Lake Victoria, Kenya, has produced more than 3,500 specimens, which makes it one of the best known fossil primates. The species name honours Donald Gordon MacInnes, a British palaeontologist and fossil collector who gathered the first known specimens in the 1930s, and the species was named formally by G.H.R. von Koenigswald in 1969. It was the smallest known terrestrial anthropoid, with a body mass of about 3 to 5 kilograms, and the males were larger than the females. It resembles the living monkey subfamilies Colobinae and Cercopithecinae but predates their last common ancestor, and is thought to be a sister taxon to them. It lived mainly in semi-arid woodland and ate a highly frugivorous diet with some leaves and seeds, and it moved on four limbs, mostly on the ground but with some tree-climbing features.