Meganthropus

Meganthropus is an extinct genus of pongine hominid ape known from the Pleistocene of Indonesia. It is known from a series of large jaw and skull fragments found at the Sangiran site near Surakarta in Central Java, alongside several isolated teeth. The original fossils were ascribed to a new species, Meganthropus palaeojavanicus, and for a long time the genus name was used as an informal name for the fossils. Its taxonomy has a long and convoluted history: in the mid-2000s most palaeoanthropologists considered the specimens related to Homo erectus in some way, and the names Homo palaeojavanicus and Australopithecus palaeojavanicus were used as well. In 2019 a study of tooth morphology found Meganthropus a valid genus of non-hominin hominid ape, most closely related to Lufengpithecus. The fossil finds are relatively few, and it is a distinct possibility that they are a paraphyletic assemblage.