Sometimes you depend at the news and it ’s all coronavirus this and forest fires that , which can make life seem pretty depressing . But then , just when you require it most , you get arafting scallywag . So to arise the gloom and make liveliness wonderful again , here ’s some split word about a group of monkeys that sailed from Africa to South America around 35 to 32 million long time ago .
The rafting monkey theory gained traction in the 1980s as the sound potential explanation for the mien of prelate in the Americas . All of those currently recover on the continent belong to to thePlatyrrhinelineage , which uprise in Africa but suddenly appear in the American fossil record around 36 million old age ago .
With no predecessor in the New World , these pioneering Platyrrhines are thought to have somehow traverse the Atlantic , possibly by inadvertently sailing on a chunk of Edwin Herbert Land that became disconnected from mainland Africa and was swept westward by ocean current .
Upon arrival , these marine simian start be the American dreaming , colonize the continent and becoming the dominant – and in fact only – primatesto live in the Americas until the first humans get in billion of years later .
At least , that ’s what we think . However , a new study in the journalSciencehas throw a whole new cast of characters into the premix , suggesting that a second group of primates may also have tested out their sea leg by making a trans - Atlantic voyage of their own .
The report authors describe the discovery of four fossilise molars along the banks of the Yuruá River in thePeruvian Amazon . The tooth belonged to a hierarch that was not a Platyrrhine , instead bearing a strong resemblance to those of a now - extinct primate blood squall Parapithecidae .
Tiny molar teeth ofUcayalipithecus perditafrom the Santa Rosa fossil situation in Amazonian Perú . figure of speech : Erik Seiffert
grant to the researchers , the teeth demo several features that set them apart fromNew World monkeys , include “ bulbous and basally inflate primary cusp , very restricted trigon catchment basin [ and ] well - break conules . ” These gadget characteristic place the owner of these molars firmly within the Parapithecidae , which live in North and East Africa until becoming nonextant around 11.5 million yr ago .
After naming the speciesUcayalipithecus perditaand determining that it would have last between 35 and 32 million years ago , the researchers then turned their attention to the always controversial conundrum of international scamp exaltation .
While not everyone is win over by the idea of raft primates , the study generator point out that there are several reasons to believe that these scamp did indeed cross the ocean on some variety of float platform . For one thing , the appearance ofU. perditain the Americas lines up with a drop in sea layer triggered by the glaciation of the Antarctic , which could well have made such a crossing easier .
Like the Platyrrhines , this 2d wave of marine monkeys would have had to be extremely resilient to survive the carrefour , mayhap going without food for thought or water for foresighted full stop . On top of this , the fact that the fossilize molar were establish thousands of kilometers from the Atlantic Coast suggest that the fresh arrival must have thrived for a considerable amount of time and spread out over much of the continent . This , in turn , indicate a gamey point of behavioral tractability , as the rapscallion would have been required to adapt their foraging patterns to match their new surroundings .
In all likelihood , the next article you read will be about coronavirus , which is plain a major bummer , but never forget that there was once a golden age of scamp raft , when not one but two groups of primates sail from Africa to South America .
