, Paris '' jaw The first specimen, a partial jaw discovered in 1909 by a gold prospector at
Koru, near
Kisumu in western Kenya, was also the oldest fossil hominoid known until recently, and the first fossil mammal ever found in sub-Saharan Africa. The name,
Proconsul, was devised by in 1933 and means "before Consul"; the name of a famous captive chimp in London. At the time Consul was being used as a circus name for performing chimpanzees. The
Folies Bergère of 1903 in
Paris had a popular performing
chimpanzee named Consul, and so did the Belle Vue Zoo in
Manchester, England, in 1894. On the latter's death in that year Ben Brierley wrote a commemorative poem wondering where the "
Missing Link" between chimpanzees and men was. Hopwood in 1931 had discovered the fossils of three individuals while expeditioning with
Louis Leakey in the vicinity of
Lake Victoria. The Consul that he selected to use in the name was neither of the ones mentioned above, but another located in the
London Zoo. Consul is being used Linnaean-style to symbolize the
chimpanzee.
Proconsul is therefore "ancestral to the Chimpanzee" in Hopwood's words. He also added
africanus as the species name. eleven years after he and
Wilfrid Le Gros Clark had defined
africanus,
nyanzae and
major. It was not immediately accepted but ultimately prevailed. The history of
hominoid classification in the second half of the 20th century is sufficiently complex to warrant a few books itself. Most of the palaeoanthropologists have changed their minds at least once as new fossils have come to light and new observations have made, and will probably continue to do so. The classifications found in the literature of one decade are not generally the same as those of another. For example, in 1987 Peter Andrews and Lawrence Martin, established palaeontologists, took the point of view that
Proconsul is not a hominoid, but is a sister taxon to it. ==Taxonomy==