† These authors contributed equally to this work.Abstract: Most vertebrate fossils are rare and difficult to find and although paleontologists and paleoanthropologists use geological maps to identify potential fossil-bearing deposits, the process of locating fossiliferous localities often involves a great deal of luck. One way to reduce the role of serendipity is to develop predictive models that increase the likelihood of locating fossils by identifying combinations of geological, geospatial, and spectral features that are common to productive localities. We applied GEographic Object-Based Image Analysis (GEOBIA) of high resolution QuickBird and medium resolution images from the Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) along with GIS data such as slope and surface geology layers to identify potentially productive Eocene vertebrate fossil localities in the Great Divide Basin, Wyoming. The spectral and spatial characteristics of the image objects that represent a highly productive locality (WMU-VP-222) were used to extract similar image objects in the area covered by the high resolution imagery and throughout the basin using the Landsat imagery. During the 2013 summer field season, twenty-six locations that would not have been spotted from the road in a traditional ground survey were visited. Fourteen of the eighteen localities that were fossiliferous were identified by the predictive model. In 2014, the GEOBIA techniques were applied to Landsat 8 imagery of the entire basin, correctly identifying six new productive localities in a previously unsurveyed part of the basin.
Primates were an important component of the Early Cenozoic fossil record of North American mammals. Archaic primate‐like mammals known as Plesiadapiformes were common during the Paleocene epoch, while Euprimates appeared during a period of marked global warming at the beginning of the Eocene, most likely as migrants from East Asia across a high‐latitude forested belt that connected Asia, North America, and Europe. Two major groups of Primates (the lemur‐like Adapoidea and tarsier‐like Omomyoidea) flourished during the Early and Middle Eocene, but deteriorating climate (i.e., cooling and drying) resulted in greatly decreased primate diversity in the Late Eocene. A single rare and enigmatic fossil primate (
Ekgmowechashala
) is known from the Oligocene of North America, and when it disappeared at about 26 million years ago, the story of North American fossil primates came to an end.
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