Eocene primates of South America and the African origins of New World monkeys

Abstract

The platyrrhine primates, or New World monkeys, are immigrant mammals whose fossil record comes from Tertiary and Quaternary sediments of South America and the Caribbean Greater Antilles. The time and place of platyrrhine origins are some of the most controversial issues in primate palaeontology, although an African Palaeogene ancestry has been presumed by most primatologists. Until now, the oldest fossil records of New World monkeys have come from Salla, Bolivia, and date to approximately 26 million years ago, or the Late Oligocene epoch. Here we report the discovery of new primates from the ?Late Eocene epoch of Amazonian Peru, which extends the fossil record of primates in South America back approximately 10 million years. The new specimens are important for understanding the origin and early evolution of modern platyrrhine primates because they bear little resemblance to any extinct or living South American primate, but they do bear striking resemblances to Eocene African anthropoids, and our phylogenetic analysis suggests a relationship with African taxa. The discovery of these new primates brings the first appearance datum of caviomorph rodents and primates in South America back into close correspondence, but raises new questions about the timing and means of arrival of these two mammalian groups.

Tropical ancient DNA reveals relationships of the extinct Bahamian giant tortoiseChelonoidis alburyorum

“…Chelonoidis is most closely related to African tortoises; fossils of related tortoises are unknown from North America. Thus, overseas dispersal from Africa has been postulated to explain its occurrence in South America [55], as in New World monkeys [57] and rodents [58]. According to our molecular clock calculations, and in agreement with the oldest record of a fossil tortoise in South America, the divergence of Chelonoidis from the African Geochelone sulcata and subsequent dispersal to South America would have occurred distinctly later than in the two other groups (Eocene), around the Oligocene-Miocene transition (figure 1).…”

A 60-million-year Cenozoic history of western Amazonian ecosystems in Contamana, eastern Peru

“…It led to the publication of a monograph (Campbell, 2004), mainly focusing on mammals, that described rodents (Frailey and Campbell, 2004), marsupials (Goin and Candela, 2004), a possible gondwanathere , bats (Czaplewski and Campbell, 2004), and notoungulates (Shockey et al, 2004). It also yielded cingulate xenarthrans, described by Ciancio et al (2013), and the earliest and basalmost South American primate described thus far (Bond et al, 2015). In the absence of any temporal constraint other than mammalian biochronology (which has been difficult given that most Santarosan taxa are unique to that site), the age of this locality remains unclear: it may be either "?late Eocene" (e.g., Bond et al, 2015) or, more probably, early Oligocene (Shockey et al, 2004;Croft et al, 2009: 197;Antoine et al, 2012;Kay, 2015).…”

Ancestral resurrection of anthropoid estrogen receptor β demonstrates functional consequences of positive selection

“…However, large gaps in fossil evidence and variations in interpretation still exist in the literature on anthropoid primate evolution, creating controversy especially concerning the means, origin and timing of their arrival to the New World. The recent discovery of Perupithecus , the earliest primate fossil in South America to date, places New World monkey ancestors in South America approximately 36 mya and supports an African origin of anthropoids in the New World (Bond et al, 2015). Morphology alone, while indispensable in reconstructing evolutionary history, does not provide information about the soft anatomy, physiology, and molecules that once existed within these and other extinct anthropoid species.…”