Scientists from Argentina and the United States have discovered in Peru the oldest primate fossil on the American continent known to date, which has been dated to 35 million years ago . The Peruvian fossil in question is a tooth, and it is identical to that of an extinct African monkey, suggesting that South American monkeys are of African origin. The discovery took place in the Santa Rosa deposit, located in the Acre region, in the Peruvian Amazon, along the Juruá River. It is from the Eocene epoch (between 56 and 34 million years ago), and Kenneth Campbell, from the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History, was working on it, who along with his team colleagues was dedicated to analyzing the abundant remains present. of small vertebrates, such as marsupials, ungulates, and rodents.
According to researcher Mariano Bond, from the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research of Argentina (Conicet), Campbell’s collaborator and main author of the study published in the journal Nature , the team collected these remains and took them to the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles to examine them thoroughly. Among them were a small batch of native ungulate teeth and a small upper left molar that turned out to belong to a primate. Its dating to 35 million years confirmed it as the oldest in South America , since the oldest fossils previously found were about 26 million years old and had been found in Bolivia.
In addition, the research provides news about the possible origin of the apes of the American continent . And it is that this molar was different from those of other South American fossil primates from Patagonia and seemed to correspond to a primitive group. But the great surprise came when comparing this monkey from Peru with other extinct primates, and it was impossible to distinguish from a species that inhabited the Eocene of Libya. The extraordinary similarity of the Santa Rosa primate with that of the African country – “they could even belong to the same family”, according to Bond – indicates that it is “a form recently arrived from Africa, closely related to the ancestral group of some or all Platyrhine primates ”. Another explanation would be that this group “originated and differentiated in Africa, to later become extinct there and continue in South America .”
Image: Ron Blakey
