Lamar Professor Sifts Ancient Primates Out of South Texas Dirt
By Beth Gallaspy, The Beaumont Enterprise, Texas
Apr. 1–In the scheme of time he works in, the 20-plus years Lamar University Professor Jim Westgate has spent excavating and studying fossil deposits at what once was beachfront property near Laredo is nothing.
Those years of work offered a payoff last week when Westgate announced the discovery of three new genera and four new species of tiny primates that lived 42 million years ago in the tropical swamp that existed where an international border sits now.
The discovery is significant, Westgate said, because it shows four different species of primates living together at a time when they were becoming extinct on much of the changing continent.
“It was kind of the last gasp for the primates in North America,” Westgate said in a telephone interview from Philadelphia, Pa., where he and two colleagues presented their findings at an American Association of Physical Anthropologists conference.
Much attention today is on potential for rising seas due to global warming. But at that stage of geologic history, known as the Eocene Epoch, seas were receding in response to the rise of the Rocky Mountains.
The area where Laredo is now would have been under water 80 million years ago, but 42 million years ago it was on the edge of a coastal lagoon. The locale inspired the name of one of the new genera, which will not be released until findings are published but means “primate of the coastal lagoons” in Latin, Westgate said. Names for the other two new genera have not been determined, Westgate said.
The ancient geography at what’s now Lake Casa Blanca International State Park left behind a rich area of fossil deposits, which Westgate excavated from 1983 to 1996 with the help of colleagues and students. They removed and acid-washed 15 tons of material, but have not yet been able to microscopically examine everything.
“One of our main goals is to get the material out of the ground and protect it. Then it may take years to do the research and document what you’ve collected,” said Westgate, professor of earth and space sciences at Lamar University.
“We knew way back we had something important. Now we’re targeting areas that needed more research,” he said.
Among the relics recovered from the site were about 1,800 mammal teeth, including 50 from primates. The teeth, which measure about 4 millimeters, were analyzed and compared with other primate teeth from the same era by Westgate’s co-author, Dana Cope, associate professor of anthropology at College of Charleston.
Cope determined the specimens were not from known primates but from a new genus, actually three new genera, of omomyine primates. The scientists who heard their findings Thursday seemed to agree, Cope and Westgate said.
Cope said he had the easy job compared to digging and washing 15 tons of sediment.
“That’s blue-collar paleontology,” Cope said by phone from Philadelphia. “… This was scientifically very important. This is a very important locality. Not much is known about eocene mammals outside the Rocky Mountains.”
The researchers have focused so far on one genus that provided most of the teeth. Based on those samples, Cope said the primate likely had a diet of leaves and foliage and weighed about two pounds.
Its closest now-living relative would be the tarsier, a tiny big-eyed animal that lives in the Philippines, Cope said. The ancient primate probably looked more like a galago, also known as a bush baby, a small primate that still lives in Africa, he said.
It’s hard to give a full physical description, though, when all you have to go on are a few 42-million-year-old teeth the size of sand grains.
More discoveries still could come from the Laredo site. Westgate, who also is a research associate in the Vertebrate Paleontology Laboratory at University of Texas-Austin’s Texas Natural Science Center, said in December he brought about 500 pounds of acid-washed material back to Beaumont from Austin, where it had been stored.
As time permits, he and his students will be sifting through it under microscopes, searching for primate teeth the size of sand grains or other remnants of the days before humans.
bgallaspy@beaumontenterprise.com
(409) 880-0726
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Copyright (c) 2007, The Beaumont Enterprise, Texas
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