Skip to main content

World's smallest fossil monkey found in Amazon jungle

A team of Peruvian and American scientists have uncovered the 18-million-year-old remains of the smallest fossil monkey ever found.
A fossilized tooth found in Peru's Amazon jungle has been identified as belonging to a new species of tiny monkey no heavier than a hamster.
The specimen is important because it helps bridge a 15-million-year gap in the fossil record for New World monkeys, says a team led by Duke University and the National University of Piura in Peru.
The new fossil was unearthed from an exposed river bank along the Río Alto Madre de Dios in southeastern Peru. There, researchers dug up chunks of sandstone and gravel, put them in bags, and hauled them away to be soaked in water and then strained through sieves to filter out the fossilized teeth, jaws, and bone fragments buried within.
The team searched through some 2,000 pounds of sediment containing hundreds of fossils of rodents, bats and other animals before they spotted the lone monkey tooth.
"Primate fossils are as rare as hen's teeth," said first author Richard Kay, a professor of evolutionary anthropology at Duke who has been doing paleontological research in South America for nearly four decades.
A single upper molar, the specimen was just "double the size of the head of a pin" and "could fall through a window screen," Kay said.
Paleontologists can tell a lot from monkey teeth, particularly molars. Based on the tooth's relative size and shape, the researchers think the animal likely dined on energy-rich fruits and insects, and weighed in at less than half a pound -- only slightly heavier than a baseball. Some of South America's larger monkeys, such as howlers and muriquis, can grow to 50 times that heft.
"It's by far the smallest fossil monkey that's ever been found worldwide," Kay said. Only one monkey species alive today, the teacup-sized pygmy marmoset, is smaller, "but barely," Kay said.
In a paper published online July 23 in the Journal of Human Evolution, the team dubbed the animal Parvimico materdei, or "tiny monkey from the Mother of God River."
Now stored in the permanent collections of the Institute of Paleontology at Peru's National University of Piura, the find is important because it's one of the few clues scientists have from a key missing chapter in monkey evolution.
Monkeys are thought to have arrived in South America from Africa some 40 million years ago, quickly diversifying into the 150-plus New World species we know today, most of which inhabit the Amazon rainforest. Yet exactly how that process unfolded is a bit of a mystery, in large part because of a gap in the monkey fossil record between 13 and 31 million years ago with only a few fragments.
In that gap lies Parvimico. The new fossil dates back 17 to 19 million years, which puts it "smack dab in the time and place when we would have expected diversification to have occurred in the New World monkeys," Kay said.
The team is currently on another fossil collecting expedition in the Peruvian Amazon that will wrap up in August, concentrating their efforts in remote river sites with 30-million-year-old sediments.
"If we find a primate there, that would really be pay dirt," Kay said.
Other authors include Jean-Nöel Martinez and Luis Angel Valdivia of the National University of Piura, Lauren Gonzales of the University of South Carolina, Wout Salenbien and Paul Baker of Duke's Nicholas School of the Environment, Siobhán Cooke of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and Catherine Rigsby of East Carolina University.
This research was supported by the National Science Foundation (EAR 1338694, DDIG 0726134) and the National Geographic Society (Young Explorers Grant 9920-16 and Waitt Grant W449-16).
Story Source:
Materials provided by Duke University. Original written by Robin A. Smith. 
Note: Content may be edited.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Home births as safe as hospital births: International study suggests

A large international study led by McMaster University shows that low risk pregnant women who intend to give birth at home have no increased chance of the baby's perinatal or neonatal death compared to other low risk women who intend to give birth in a hospital. The results have been published by  The Lancet 's  EClinicalMedicine  journal. "More women in well-resourced countries are choosing birth at home, but concerns have persisted about their safety," said Eileen Hutton, professor emeritus of obstetrics and gynecology at McMaster, founding director of the McMaster Midwifery Research Centre and first author of the paper. "This research clearly demonstrates the risk is no different when the birth is intended to be at home or in hospital." The study examined the safety of place of birth by reporting on the risk of death at the time of birth or within the first four weeks, and found no clinically important or statistically different risk between home...
Post a Comment
Read more

Dark matter may be older than the Big Bang

Dark matter, which researchers believe make up about 80% of the universe's mass, is one of the most elusive mysteries in modern physics. What exactly it is and how it came to be is a mystery, but a new Johns Hopkins University study now suggests that dark matter may have existed before the Big Bang. The study, published August 7 in  Physical Review Letters , presents a new idea of how dark matter was born and how to identify it with astronomical observations. "The study revealed a new connection between particle physics and astronomy. If dark matter consists of new particles that were born before the Big Bang, they affect the way galaxies are distributed in the sky in a unique way. This connection may be used to reveal their identity and make conclusions about the times before the Big Bang too," says Tommi Tenkanen, a postdoctoral fellow in Physics and Astronomy at the Johns Hopkins University and the study's author. While not much is known about its origins,...
Post a Comment
Read more

Scientists challenge notion of binary sexuality with naming of new plant species

A collaborative team of scientists from the US and Australia has named a new plant species from the remote Outback. Bucknell University biology postdoctoral fellow Angela McDonnell and professor Chris Martine led the description of the plant that had confounded field biologists for decades because of the unusual fluidity of its flower form. The discovery, published in the open access journal  PhytoKeys , offers a powerful example of the diversity of sexual forms found among plants. The new species of bush tomato discovered in remote Australia provides a compelling example of the fact that sexuality among Earth's living creatures is far more diverse -- and interesting -- than many people likely realize. Bucknell University postdoctoral fellow Angela McDonnell and biology professor Chris Martine led the study following an expedition last year to relocate populations of the new plant, which were first noted by Australian botanists during the 1970s. Herbarium specimens from th...
Post a Comment
Read more