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| RichTravsky... |
 Posted: Sun Oct 25, 2009 9:34 pm |
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http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/48616/title/Fossil_find_sparks_debate_on_primate_origins
October 21st, 2009
Pieces of ancient primates can still pack a surprising punch. Consider a
37-million-year-old lower jaw that still sports many of its teeth and was found
in Africa by paleontologist Erik Seiffert of Stony Brook University in New York
and his colleagues. This newly unearthed creature had skeletal features that
resembled those of higher primates, but it didn’t belong to the lineage that
led to higher primates, Seiffert's team reports in the Oct. 22 Nature.
Seiffert's group assigns its fossil discovery to a new genus and species,
Afradapis longicristatus. The work follows this summer's highly publicized
announcement of another primate find: The 47-million-year-old primate Darwinius
is regarded by some as filling in an important gap in human evolution. But
Seiffert says Darwinius belongs to the same group as his team's fossil:
adapiforms, a separate and now-extinct primate group.
"It is only with the discovery of Afradapis that we have the first strong evidence
indicating that adapiform primates were common at that time and place, successfully
living alongside primitive anthropoids in Africa," Seiffert says.
[...]
Afradapis weighed between about 2.2 kilograms and 3.3 kilograms (4.8 pounds and
7.2 pounds), the researchers estimate. Most primates from more than 30 million
years ago weighed considerably less than that. Darwinius tipped the scales at
between 650 grams and 900 grams (3.2 ounces and 6.3 ounces).
[...]
Afradapis displays several jaw and tooth characteristics that began to appear
in anthropoids about 30 million years ago, Seiffert says. These traits include
the absence of second premolar teeth and the presence of a lower third premolar
tooth with a honing surface for a long upper canine, a thick jaw and full fusion
of the jaw's right and left halves.
Large cheek teeth allowed Afradapis to chew tough fibers and eat lots of leaves,
he says. But the ancient primate could also eat fruit, pitting it against African
anthropoids from the same time that mainly consumed fruit and insects, in
Seiffert's view.
But adapiforms were probably not capable of eating enough fruit to have been
dietary rivals of ancient anthropoids, counters paleontologist K. Christopher
Beard of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. Beard doubts that
Afradapis' unusually large body and teeth specialized for leaf eating put it in
an ecological league of its own, he says.
[...] |
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