NATION & WORLD Palm-size fossil resets primates’ clock, scientists say Byjohn Noble Wilford New York Times A nearly complete skeleton of a tiny, ancient primate — one that weighed no more than an ounce, had a tail longer than its body and would fit in the palm of a human hand — is the earliest well-preserved fossil primate ever found, dating back some 55 million years and dialing back the fossil record for primates by 8 million years, a research team declared Wednesday. The finding adds weight to the evidence that primates originated in Asia — not Africa — and that they emerged relatively soon after the extinction of the dinosaurs, which happened about 66 million years ago in an event known as the Cretaceous mass extinction. The older date brings scientists closer to pinpointing a pivotal event in primate and human evolution: the divergence between the lineage leading to anthropoids — which include modern monkeys, apes and humans — and the one leading to tarsiers and other types of monkeys. In a report published in the journal Nature, an international team of paleontologists said that the skeleton, recovered from an ancient lake bed in Hubei province in central China, set a new benchmark for the time that primates started roaming the planet. The primate skeleton belongs to a species never seen before, one that the researchers identified as the earliest known ancestor of tarsiers — a type of small, nocturnal primate living today in the forests of Southeast Asia.
Posted on: Sat, 08 Jun 2013 04:30:42 +0000
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