Field of Science  Old Men of the Woods  The mandible of
Khoratpithecus piriyai from Chaimanee et al. (2004). Scale bar
equals 1 cm.  The subject of today's Taxon of the Week post is
the Ponginae. Rather than comment directly on the prolonged,
bitter and largely pointless arguments on ape beta taxonomy,
I'll simply note that for this post I'm restricting Ponginae to
the clade including the modern orangutans and fossil apes closer
to orangs than other modern apes.  I say 'orangutans' because
there are two distinct modern varieties that are listed as
separate species by Groves (2005), the Sumatran Pongo abelii and
the Bornean P. pygmaeus. During the Pleistocene, orangutans were
also found in continental south-east Asia and southern China
(Bacon & Long 2002). Previous to the Pleistocene, however, a gap
of six or seven million years separates Pongo from their
generally accepted relatives in the Miocene genera Sivapithecus
and Khoratpithecus (Finarelli & Clyde 2004; Chaimanee et al.
2004). Other possible pongine ge