Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
A team of researchers from the US and Argentina have discovered the first evidence that South American monkeys originated in Africa and crossed the Atlantic Ocean to reach their new home, according to research published online Wednesday in the journal Nature.
Scientists have long hypothesized that the origin story of the South American monkeys involved something to that effect, but such a suggestion was difficult to support without fossil data to back up those claims. The discovery of three new extinct monkeys from eastern Peru seems to indicate that primates now living in that region can trace their roots back to African ancestors.
Scientists weren’t monkeying around
Those fossils, which were first discovered by Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County curator and study co-author Dr. Ken Campbell in 2010, were found in the heart of the Peruvian Amazon. However, since they were so unusual to South America, it took two years of research to determine that they were actually the remains of a primitive monkey.
South America was an island continent for millions of years, and became isolated from Africa due to plate tectonics over 65 million years ago. Yet it somehow managed to become home to unfamiliar types of plants and animals, including monkeys and rodents whose remains appeared suddenly and mysteriously in the continent’s fossil record.
“The earliest phases of the evolutionary history of monkeys in South America have remained cloaked in mystery,” the museum explained. While experts have long believed that the creatures managed to survive a transatlantic journey from Africa, there had been little evidence to support these claims until recently.
Dr. Campbell has spent the past several years working alongside Argentinean paleontologists in eastern Peru, hoping to solve the mystery of the South American monkeys. He explained that fossils in the Amazon Basin are rare and hard to find, as work is limited to the dry season.
The proof is in the teeth
Previously, the oldest fossil records of South or Central American monkeys dated back 26 million years, but the new fossils indicate that monkeys actually arrived in the New World at least 10 million years earlier. Furthermore, the characteristics of these early monkey’s teeth are the first solid evidence that they somehow crossed the Atlantic Ocean from Africa.
According to the Daily Mail, the teeth of those creatures more closely resemble African primates of the era than other species found in South America. The new species of monkey, which has been named Perupithecus ucayaliensis, would have been a small creature that would have been about the same size as tamarins, with body no more than 10 inches long.
The researchers believe that Perupithecus would have most closely related to an extinct primate called Talahpithecus, which lived around 38-39 million years ago in what is now Libya. One complete upper molar and two incomplete teeth were found in a riverbed during a dry period in Santa Rosa in eastern Peru, according to the UK newspaper.
“’Numerous studies have focused on the possibility of primates crossing the Atlantic to reach South America from Africa,” the study authors wrote. “A similar means of arrival in South America has often been proposed for the hystricognath rodents, the dispersal of amphisbaenian and gekkotan lizards.”
“The discovery of these new primates brings the first appearance datum of caviomorph rodents and primates in South America back into close correspondence, but raises new questions about the timing and means of arrival of these two mammalian groups,” they added.
Now they’re just trying to figure out how they crossed the ocean. Did monkeys once sail the high seas? The world may never know.
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