Proconsul africanus

Proconsul africanus was an ape which lived from about 23 to 14 million years ago during the Miocene epoch. It was a fruit eater and its brain was larger than that of a monkey, although probably not as large as that of a modern ape.

It was named by paleontologist Arthur Hopwood in 1933 after a number of chimpanzees all called Consul, which performed human like circus acts, such as riding a bicycle and playing the piano, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Other species of the genus Proconsul have since been discovered.