Australopithecus bahrelghazali is an extinct species of australopithecine discovered in 1995 at Koro Toro, Bahr el Gazel, Chad, existing around 3.5 million years ago in the Pliocene. It is the first and only australopithecine known from Central Africa, and demonstrates that this group was widely distributed across Africa as opposed to being restricted to East and southern Africa as previously thought. The validity of A. bahrelghazali has not been widely accepted, in favour of classifying the specimens as A. afarensis, a better known Pliocene australopithecine from East Africa, because of the anatomical similarity and the fact that A. bahrelghazali is known only from 3 partial jawbones and an isolated premolar. The specimens inhabited a lakeside grassland environment with sparse tree cover, possibly similar to the modern Okavango Delta, and similarly predominantly ate C4 savanna foods—such as grasses, sedges, storage organs, or rhizomes—and to a lesser degree also C3 forest foods—such as fruits, flowers, pods, or insects. However, the teeth seem ill-equipped to process C4 plants, so its true diet is unclear. Research history In 1995, two specimens were recovered from Koro Toro, Bahr el Gazel, Chad: KT12/H1 or "Abel" (a jawbone preserving the premolars, canines, and the right second incisor) and KT12/H2 (an isolated first upper premolar). They were discovered by the Franco-Chadian Paleoanthropological Mission, and reported by French palaeontologist Michel Brunet, French geographer Alain Beauvilain, French anthropologist Yves Coppens, French palaeontologist Emile Heintz, Chadian geochemist engineer Aladji Hamit Elimi Ali Moutaye, and British palaeoanthropologist David Pilbeam. Based on the wildlife assemblage, the remains were roughly dated to the middle to late Pliocene 3.5–3 million years ago. This caused the describers to preliminarily assign the remains to Australopithecus afarensis, which inhabited Ethiopia during that time period, barring more detailed anatomical comparisons. In 1996, they allocated it to a new species, A. bahrelghazali, naming it after the region; Bahr el Gazel means "River of the Gazelles" in classical Arabic. They denoted KT12/H1 as the holotype and KT12/H2 a paratype. Another jawbone was discovered at the K13 site in 1997, and a third from the KT40 site. In 2008, a pelite (a type of sedimentary rock) recovered from the same sediments as Abel was radiometrically dated (using the 10Be/9Be ratio) to have been deposited 3.58 million years ago. However, Beauvilain responded that Abel was not found in situ but at the edge of a shallow gulley, and it is impossible to figure