11 Million Years Old Primate Discovered

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oi-Cara

By Cara

Thursday, April 22, 2010, 17:17

Scientists have discovered remains of an eleven-million-year-old, new primate in a garbage dump in Catalonia, Spain.

Named Pliopithecus canmatensis, after the site from which it was discovered, the primate belonged to an extinct family of 'old world monkeys' - Catarrhini, which dispersed from Africa to Eurasia.

Scientists were able to identify the monkey from the fragments of its jaws and molars.

The new species, according to the scientists, sheds light on the evolution of the superfamily Pliopithecoidea, primates that include animals that diverged before the separation of the two current superfamilies: the cercopithecoids (Old World monkeys) and the hominids (anthromorphs and humans). It thrived in Eurasia during the Early and Late Miocene, or between 23.5 and 5.3 million years ago.

"Based on the anatomical, palaeobiographical information available, the most probable evolutionary scenario for this group is that the Pliopithecoidea were the first Catarrhini to disperse from Africa to Eurasia, where they experienced an evolutionary radiation in a continent initially deserted of other anthropoids (apes)," said David Alba, the project leader and a researcher at the Catalan Institute for Palaeontology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona.

The subfamily to which this particular species belonged originated from an ancestor called the dionsisopithecine in Asia. This ancestor led to animals that later moved into Europe around 15 million years ago.

The study has been published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.