Bonobo type specimen (Pan paniscus)

On December 6, 1927, the Congo Museum (now Royal Museum for Central Africa, Tervuren, Belgium) received the skull and the skin of an adult female chimpanzee collected in the Congo River basin, more or less 30 km south of Befalé, a town located south of the upper Maringa River, a confluent of the Lulonga, itself confluent of the Congo River, in the DR Congo.

This female chimpanzee skull (registered #9338) was first classified as the type of Pan satyrus paniscus, a subspecies of the eastern chimpanzee (Schwarz, 1929).

Soon after the publication of Schwarz, the taxon was elevated to species rank, calling it Pan paniscus, in the first major study on the pygmy chimpanzee (Coolidge, 1933).

Since the last 20 years, the development of new methodologies (geometric morphometrics, imaging facilities…) and tools (digitalizers, surface or CT scanners…) caused a growing demand for access to the osteological collection of great apes of the Royal Museum for Central Africa. Preservation and valorisation of collections are two antagonist missions for institutions.

Osteological collections are by nature composed by rare, fragile and irreplaceable specimens. Multiplication of manipulations may at term prevent the preservation of the specimens integrity. However, the value of a collection highly depends on the amount of growing knowledge which results from the studies that are led on it. For these reasons, we choose to provide access to complete data for the type specimen of Pan paniscus in order to allow other scientists to include this key specimen in their own research.