[1] It was named by paleontologist Arthur Hopwood in 1933 after a number of chimpanzees all called Consul, which performed human like circus acts, such as riding a bicycle and playing the piano, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Mary Leakey made an especially complete find of Proconsul there in 1948,[3] which was for a number of decades labeled africanus, but was reclassified as heseloni in 1993 by Alan Walker.

The paleontologist Louis Leakey, who was one of the foremost fossil-hunters of the 20th century and a champion of evolution, said: An especially important creature was Proconsul africanus.

We have good forelimb bones for it, and in 1948 on Rusinga Island Mary [Leakey] discovered a skull, the first nearly complete specimen ever found.

It seems to me, however, to be neither an ancestral ape, nor yet an ancestor of man, but a side branch with characteristics of both stocks..."Leakey changed his mind a few times about the exact classification of Proconsul, as did most other palaeontologists.

Based upon the dental morphology, it is conjectured that Proconsul africanus was a frugivorous species; a study by Aiello in 1981 concluded it was a "below-branch feeder."