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 said 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.
“It’s a close cousin, in fact,” said study author Christopher Beard, curator at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. He said it is “the closest thing we have to an ancestor of humans” so long ago.
In a report published in the journal Nature, an international team of paleontologists led by Xijun Ni of the Chinese Academy of Sciences said 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.
