According to Foreign Media New Atlas, researchers have identified the oldest known fossil primate, which is about 65.9 million years old. This comes just after one of Earth's largest mass extinction events, suggesting that the ancestors of all primates originally lived with dinosaurs.
About 66 million years ago, a giant asteroid (perhaps a comet fragment) crashed into Earth, changing earth forever. About three-quarters of the plants and animals on Earth are extinct, and the most famous victims are dinosaurs. While this is tragic, it is actually good news for our own ancestors. Millions of years ago, mammals played a minor role in dinosaurs, scurrying around their feet, maintaining a relatively small body size. But as this competition disappeared, mammals took advantage of the vacuum of power and diversified into new forms. And these good times are the focus of the new research.
"It's a big surprise to think of our earliest paleocapient ancestors," said Gregory Wilson Mantilla, co-lead author of the study. "They were some of the first mammals to diversify in this new post-mass extinction world using fruits and insects from forest trees."
For the study, the team analyzed a group of fossil teeth from paleocids, allowing them to determine their age and which species they belonged to. Some of these teeth were found to have come from a previously known species called Purgatorius Janisae, an early primate about the size of a mouse that was thought to have eaten insects. But three of the teeth have distinct features that have never been seen before. The team determined they belonged to an entirely new species, which they called Purgatorius mckeeveri.
On top of that, the fossils are about 65.9 million years old, between 105,000 and 139,000 years after the mass extinction. This makes them the oldest known primate fossils, about 1 million years or so before previous record holders.
"This discovery is exciting because it represents the emergence of the oldest paleoclamate in the fossil record," said Stephen Chester, co-lead author of the study. "It adds to our understanding of how the earliest primates separated themselves from their competitors after the demise of the dinosaurs."
But of course, just because these are the oldest creatures we've found, doesn't mean they're the oldest creatures in existence. The team says that for these creatures to be so established by then, their ancestry is likely to have arisen in the late Cretaceous period, meaning the oldest primates ever lived with dinosaurs.
The study was published in the royal society open science journal.