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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/04/science/04prim.html

One-Ounce Mississippian of 55.8 Million Years Ago
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                        By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD




Published: March 4, 2008



         It is hard to picture a wee monkeylike
adult creature weighing no more than an ounce. But fossils of the 55.8
million-year-old animal, the earliest known primate to inhabit North
America, have emerged from coastal sediments in Mississippi.
 



   

 It is even harder to imagine
that tiny primates of this primitive kind were able to migrate to this
continent all the way from their Asian homeland.
The world then
was much warmer, however, basking in tropical or subtropical conditions
nearly everywhere as continents drifted apart. Over countless
generations the tree-dwelling primates slowly crossed to America from
Siberia, presumably by the Bering land bridge when it was probably
heavily forested. 
Some primates apparently continued through Greenland and Scotland, connecting 
links to Europe at a time of lower sea levels.


Thisnew reconstruction of the early dispersal of primates, the order 
ofmammals that now includes humans and apes, stems from an analysis of 
afossil primate discovered in 2001 near Meridian, Miss. Theidentification and 
significance of the new species are reported in The Proceedings of the 
National Academy of Sciences.


K.
Christopher Beard, a paleontologist at the Carnegie Museum of Natural
History in Pittsburgh, wrote that the species, Teilhardina magnoliana,
is older and more primitive than other early North American and
European primates. It is less than 100,000 years older than related
specimens found in the Big Horn Basin of Wyoming and in Belgium and
France.


The genus bears the name of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,
the French Jesuit and paleontologist, who spent years studying fossils
in China. Magnoliana is a tip of the hat to Mississippi, the Magnolia
State. And the site of the fossil-bearing outcrop south of Meridian is
called Red Hot, for the name of a diner that used to be nearby. “This
primate’s a little teeny guy,” Dr. Beard said in a phone interview. The
tiniest living primate, the pygmy mouse lemur of Madagascar, is about
the same size.


In their beginning, all primates were small. The
one from Mississippi, Dr. Beard said, probably looked like the big-eyed
tarsiers of Southeast Asia or a small monkey. Scientists theorize that
the Teilhardina genus is not far removed from the common ancestor of
tarsiers and monkeys.


Like other diminutive primates, this one
lived in trees, climbing, leaping and swinging from branches. One
defining characteristic of the primate order is the adaptation of the
fore limbs and hands to seizing and handling objects.


When the
Mississippi primate lived, the gulf waters reached well inland, and
warm and humid Meridian had tidal channels. Scientists said the animal
probably ate insects, fruits, sap and gum and was about as small as an
adult primate could be.

 
Peter Wilf, a paleobotanist at Penn Statewho has studied the site but did not 
contribute to the report, said theprimate lived in a subtropical forest of 
shrubs and tall trees,flowering plants and ferns, sassafras and sumac.


Other scientists
said the new research, though impressive, was not likely to resolve
differing interpretations of primate dispersal until more detailed and
extensive fossils were collected.


One hypothesis was that the
animals migrated to Europe and then to North America as the world grew
warmer, the oceans wider and sea levels lower. In this ice-free world,
sea-level changes were caused by continental drift, altering the volume
of ocean basins.


But Eurasia was not a solid landmass then, with
shallow seas standing in the way of a westerly advance of the tiny
primates, and Western Europe was more an archipelago of islands than a
continent. So scientists looked for an alternative story to the fateful
global primate expansion.

 
When the world cooled 35 million
years ago, Dr. Beard said, the descendants of the Mississippi primate
and others died out everywhere except in Southeast Asia and Africa,
where survivors evolved into the great apes and humans. 




      
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