Ekembo nyanzae
extinct species of primates
Ekembo nyanzae, originally classed as a species of Proconsul, is a species of fossil primate first discovered by Louis Leakey on Rusinga Island in 1942, which he published in Nature in 1943. It is also known by the name Dryopithecus africanus. A joint publication of Wilfrid Le Gros Clark and Louis Leakey in 1951, "The Miocene Hominoidea of East Africa", first defines Proconsul nyanzae. In 1965 Simons and Pilbeam replaced Proconsul with Dryopithecus, using the same species names.
In 1967, Louis defined Kenyapithecus africanus on seven fossils from Rusinga Island. He saw it as an ancestor of wickeri and also of man, with a date of 20 mya in the middle Miocene. Another fossil found by the VanCouverings on Rusinga in 1967 seemed to confirm africanus. In 1969 Simons and Pilbeam moved Kenyapithecus africanus into Dryopithecus nyanzae. By 1978 the genus had recovered from the Dryopithecine event and was back to Proconsul. In that year Andrews moved Clark & Leakey's 1951 Sivapithecus africanus into Proconsul nyanzae.
“Ekembo nyanzae” enters the record as extinct species of primates. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Ekembo, nyanzae and extinct can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Ekembo nyanzae” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Ekembo, nyanzae and extinct provides the most credible route into that argument.
Datasets, specimens, observations and peer-reviewed methods provide the appropriate test for the technical claims summarized here. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2563949. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1942, 1943, 1951 and 1965.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ekembo nyanzae” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.