Amazonian Fossils Provide Evidence of South American Monkeys' African Origin

[ramonmercado]

Fossils from heart of Amazon provide evidence that South American monkeys came from Africa

For millions of years, South America was an island continent. Geographically isolated from Africa as a result of plate tectonics more than 65 million years ago, this continent witnessed the evolution of many unfamiliar groups of animals and plants. From time to time, animals more familiar to us today—monkeys and rodents among others—managed to arrive to this island landmass, their remains appearing abruptly in the fossil record. Yet, the earliest phases of the evolutionary history of monkeys in South America have remained cloaked in mystery. Long thought to have managed a long transatlantic journey from Africa, evidence for this hypothesis was difficult to support without fossil data.

A new discovery from the heart of the Peruvian Amazon now unveils a key chapter of the evolutionary saga of these animals. In a paper published February 4, 2015 in the scientific journal Nature, the discovery of three new extinct monkeys from eastern Peru hints strongly that South American monkeys have an African ancestry. ...

http://phys.org/news/2015-02-fossils-heart-amazon-evidence-south.html

 

[EnolaGaia]

Here's something of an update. Additional fossil finds in Peru greatly strengthen the case that ancestral monkeys must have arrived in South America via some sort of transatlantic journey (most probably by rafts of debris).

More Than 30 Million Years Ago, Monkeys Rafted Across the Atlantic to South America

Fossil teeth uncovered in Peru reveal that an extinct family of primates, thought to have lived only in Africa, made it across the ocean

In a strange twist of evolutionary history, the ancestors of modern South American monkeys such as the capuchin and woolly monkeys first came to the New World by floating across the Atlantic Ocean on mats of vegetation and earth. According to a new study, they were not the only primates to make the trip. A fossil find in Peru suggests that a different, entirely extinct family of primates undertook the same kind of oceanic voyage more than 30 million years ago.

On the banks of Río Yurúa, close to the border of Peru and Brazil, University of Southern California paleontologist Erik Seiffert documented a fossil site that contains a mix of the strange and familiar. Here, roughly 32 million-year-old rock preserves the remains of bats, relatives of capybaras, and early New World monkeys. They also found evidence of a second primate group, one thought to have lived only in Africa. ...

FULL STORY: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/monkeys-raft-across-atlantic-twice-180974637/

 

[EnolaGaia]

Here are the bibliographic particulars and abstract from the newly-published research ...

A parapithecid stem anthropoid of African origin in the Paleogene of South America

Science 10 Apr 2020:
Vol. 368, Issue 6487, pp. 194-197
DOI: 10.1126/science.aba1135

Abstract
Phylogenetic evidence suggests that platyrrhine (or New World) monkeys and caviomorph rodents of the Western Hemisphere derive from source groups from the Eocene of Afro-Arabia, a landmass that was ~1500 to 2000 kilometers east of South America during the late Paleogene. Here, we report evidence for a third mammalian lineage of African origin in the Paleogene of South America—a newly discovered genus and species of parapithecid anthropoid primate from Santa Rosa in Amazonian Perú. Bayesian clock–based phylogenetic analysis nests this genus (Ucayalipithecus) deep within the otherwise Afro-Arabian clade Parapithecoidea and indicates that transatlantic rafting of the lineage leading to Ucayalipithecus likely took place between ~35 and ~32 million years ago, a dispersal window that includes the major worldwide drop in sea level that occurred near the Eocene-Oligocene boundary.

SOURCE: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/368/6487/194