Victoriapithecus had a small brain relative to its body size with an olfactory bulb about three times as large as that in present-day monkeys

The oldest known Old World monkey, Victoriapithecus, first made headlines in 1997 when its fossilized skull was discovered on an island in Kenya’s Lake Victoria, where it lived 15 million years ago. An international team led by Fred Spoor of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and University College London (UCL), UK, has now visualized this monkey’s brain for the first time: The creature’s tiny but remarkably wrinkled brain supports the idea that brain complexity can evolve before brain size in the primate family tree. Especially surprising was the size of the monkey’s olfactory bulb: It was three times larger in Victoriapithecus than in present-day monkeys of comparable body size.