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Other similar basal primates were widespread in Eurasia and Africa during the tropical conditions of the Paleocene and Eocene. Purgatorius is the genus of the four extinct species believed to be the earliest example of a primate or a proto-primate, a primatomorph precursor to the Plesiadapiformes, dating to as old as 66 million years ago.
Primates range in size from the 30-gram (1 oz) pygmy mouse lemur to the 200-kilogram (440 lb) mountain gorilla. According to fossil evidence, the primitive ancestors of primates may have existed in the late Cretaceous period around 65 mya (million years ago), and the oldest known primate is the Late Paleocene Plesiadapis , c. 55–58 mya.
Plesiadapis is one of the oldest known primate-like mammal genera which existed about 58–55 million years ago in North America and Europe. [ 2 ] [ 3 ] Plesiadapis means "near-Adapis", which is a reference to the adapiform primate of the Eocene period , Adapis .
The crown primates are cladistically granted here into the Plesiadapiformes, and "Plesiadapiformes" become a junior synonym of the primates. With this tree, the Plesiadapiformes are not literally extinct (in the sense of having no surviving descendants). The crown primates are also called "Euprimates" in this context.
[1] Primates first evolved sometime between the Middle Cretaceous and the early Paleocene periods on either the supercontinent of Laurasia or in Africa. [2] According to molecular clock studies, the last common ancestor of all primates dates to around 79.6 mya, [3] although the earliest known fossil primates are only 54–55 million years old. [4]
The encephalization quotient of some cetaceans is therefore higher than that of most primates, including the nearest relatives of humans, such as Australopithecus. [8] This list follows partly from Walter Carl Hartwig's 2002 book The Fossil Primate Record [9] and John G. Fleagle's 2013 book Primate Adaptation and Evolution (3rd edition). [10]
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A 2014 whole-genome molecular dating analysis indicated that the gibbon lineage diverged from that of great apes (Hominidae) around 17 million years ago (16.8 ± 0.9 Mya), based on certain assumptions about the generation time and mutation rate.