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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.
Sir Wilfrid Le Gros Clark was one of the primatologists who developed the idea of trends in primate evolution and the methodology of arranging the living members of an order into an "ascending series" leading to humans. [7] Commonly used names for groups of primates such as prosimians, monkeys, lesser apes, and great apes reflect this methodology.
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 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]
A phylogenetic tree, phylogeny or evolutionary tree is a graphical representation which shows the evolutionary history between a set of species or taxa during a specific time. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] In other words, it is a branching diagram or a tree showing the evolutionary relationships among various biological species or other entities based upon ...
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.
In the following simplified cladogram, the crown primates are classified as highly derived Plesiadapiformes, possibly as sister of the Plesiadapoidea. [7] 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 ...
This relationship is shown by the ranks (prosimians in bold) in the list below of the current primate classification between the order and infraorder level. The term "prosimian" is considered taxonomically obsolete, [15] although it is used to emphasize similarities between strepsirrhines, tarsiers, and the early primates. [16] Order Primates