Proconsul is an extinct genus of primates that existed from 21 to 17 million years ago during the Miocene epoch.

Environmental reconstructions for the Early Miocene Proconsul sites are still tentative and range from forested environments to more open, arid grasslands.

[citation needed] Proconsul's monkey-like features include pronograde posture, indicated by a long flexible back, curved metacarpals, and an above-branch arboreal quadrupedal positional repertoire.

The Folies Bergère of 1903 in Paris had a popular performing chimpanzee named Consul, and so did the Belle Vue Zoological Gardens in Manchester, England, in 1894.

On the latter's death in that year Ben Brierley wrote a commemorative poem wondering where the "Missing Link" between chimpanzees and men was.

[3] The family of Proconsulidae was first proposed by Louis Leakey in 1963,[4] a decade after he and Wilfrid Le Gros Clark had defined africanus, nyanzae and major.

[5] For example, in 1987 Peter Andrews and Lawrence Martin, established palaeontologists, took the point of view that Proconsul is not a hominoid, but is a sister taxon to it.