Oldest known primate discovered

Oldest known primate discovered
Chinese Academy of Sciences
Monday, 17 June 2013

An international team of researchers has announced the discovery of the world’s oldest known fossil primate skeleton representing a previously unknown genus and species named Archicebus achilles.

The fossil was unearthed from an ancient lake bed in central China’s Hubei Province, near the course of the modern Yangtze River. In addition to being the oldest known example of an early primate skeleton, the new fossil is crucial for illuminating a pivotal event in primate and human evolution—the evolutionary divergence between the lineage leading to modern monkeys, apes and humans (collectively known as anthropoids) on the one hand and that leading to living tarsiers on the other. The scientific paper describing the discovery appears today in the prestigious journal Nature.

The fossil was recovered from sedimentary rock strata that were deposited in an ancient lake roughly 55 million years ago, during the early part of the Eocene epoch. This was an interval of global “greenhouse” conditions, when much of the world was shrouded in tropical rainforests and palm trees grew as far north as Alaska. Like most other fossils recovered from ancient lake strata, the skeleton of Archicebus was found by splitting apart the thin layers of rock containing the fossil. As a result, the skeleton of Archicebus is now preserved in two complementary pieces called a “part” and a “counterpart,” each of which contain elements of the actual skeleton as well as impressions of bones from the other side.

The international team of scientists who studied the skeleton of Archicebus was led by Dr. NI Xijun of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. NI’s collaborators include Dr. Christopher Beard of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh; Dr. Daniel Gebo of Northern Illinois University; Dr. Marian Dagosto of Northwestern University in Chicago; Dr. Jin Meng and Dr. John Flynn of the American Museum of Natural History in New York; and Dr. Paul Tafforeau of the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France.

More:
http://pda.sciencealert.com.au/news/20131606-24488.html