Paleontologists unearth 20-million-year-old ape skull in Uganda

A TEAM of Ugandan and French paleontologists announced last night they had found a 20-million-year-old ape skull in north-eastern Uganda, saying it could shed light on the region’s evolutionary history.

“This is the first time that the complete skull of an ape of this age has been found ... it is a highly important fossil and it will certainly put Uganda on the map in terms of the scientific world,” Martin Pickford, a paleontologist from the College de France in Paris, told journalists in Kampala.

The fossilised skull belonged to a male Ugandapithecus Major, a remote cousin of today’s great apes which roamed the region about 20 million years ago.