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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.
Primatomorpha is a subdivision of Euarchonta including primates and their ancestral stem-primates Plesiadapiformes. An early stem-primate, Plesiadapis, still had claws and eyes on the side of the head, making it faster on the ground than in the trees, but it began to spend long times on lower branches, feeding on fruits and leaves.
[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]
A primate is a member of the biological order Primates, the group that contains lemurs, the aye-aye, lorisids, galagos, tarsiers, monkeys, and apes, with the last category including great apes. With the exception of humans, who inhabit every continent on Earth, most primates live in tropical or subtropical regions of the Americas , Africa and ...
Since Gray's classifications, evidence accumulating from genetic phylogeny confirmed that humans, chimpanzees, and gorillas are more closely related to each other than to the orangutan. [3] The orangutans were reassigned to the family Hominidae ( great apes ), which already included humans; and the gorillas were grouped as a separate tribe ...
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.
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Lemuriformes is the sole extant infraorder of primate that falls under the suborder Strepsirrhini.It includes the lemurs of Madagascar, as well as the galagos and lorisids of Africa and Asia, although a popular alternative taxonomy places the lorisoids in their own infraorder, Lorisiformes.