Two primate lineages crossed the Atlantic millions of years ago
Four fossilized molar teeth excavated in Peru’s Amazon basin come from a now-extinct lineage of primates that rafted across the Atlantic Ocean from Africa and reached the inland site between around 35 million and 32 million years ago, researchers say. Until now, South American sites had yielded only fossils of primates ancestral to those inhabiting the continent today. Fossils from the same Peruvian site had previously suggested that ancestors of modern South American monkeys crossed the ocean from Africa by around 36 million years ago (SN: 2/4/15). The new discovery adds a second group of primate arrivals. The teeth closely resemble those of parapithecids, a primate family that inhabited northern Africa from roughly 56 million to 23 million years ago, say paleontologist Erik Seiffert of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and his colleagues. Like ancestors of living South American monkeys, parapithecids must have made a sea crossing on vegetation mats created by storms, the scientists conclude in the April 10 Science. Favorable ocean...