Diaphanitas

"De Nomine Animalis Ardipithecus"
"About the Name of the Critter Ardipithecus"

Interesting critter:

Ardipithecus ramidus

What a day to be stuck in airplanes for hours on end; I had to slurp in a bunch of files on my iPhone and then look at them on that itty-bitty screen, just to catch up on the story of Ardipithecus. Fortunately, you can just read Carl Zimmer's excellent summary to find out what's cool about it.

For a summary of a summary: it's another transitional fossil in our lineage. Ardipithecus ramidus is old, 4.4 million years or so — so it's well before Lucy and the australopithecines. The latest result is a thorough analysis of a large number of collected specimens that shows it is an interesting mosaic of traits: it was bipedal, but not quite so well adapted to terrestrial locomotion as we are, and it had feet with an opposable big toe. And of course it had a small brain, only a little larger than a chimpanzee's.

Wow, exciting stuff!

( Res )

At any rate, I find the name interesting!

From Wikipedia:

Pithecus means "ape" or "monkey" in both Greek and Latin.^[2] In the local Afar language:^[3]

• Ardi is "ground floor"
• ramidus comes from ramid or "root"
• kadabba is "basal ancestor"

That is a strange way of describing the word Pithecus. It is not exactly wrong, and I would not have put it that way. It is a Latin word, but it is a Latinization of the Greek word πίθηκος.

Okay, so Ardipithecus ramidus means "Ground Floor Ape (The) Root," and Ardipithecus kadabba means "Ground Floor Ape (The) Basal Ancestor," eh? It certainly all sounds much better in Neo-Latin, let me tell you!

LWotP: Ardipithecus -i m. "Ardipithecus."