Oldest-ever tiny primate discovered in China’s Hubei province
The discovery will help chart the evolution of primates, a family that includes humans, and should strengthen a once-contested theory that primates originated in Asia.
Palaeontologists said they had found the fossilised remains of a tiny tree-dwelling creature that lived around 55 million years ago, making it the oldest primate ever found.
This skeleton will tell us a lot of the story about the origins of primates and about our remote ancestors
“This skeleton will tell us a lot of the story about the origins of primates and about our remote ancestors,” Ni Xijun of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, who led the study, said in a teleconference on Wednesday.
The tale of the find dates back 10 years, when Ni was doing fieldwork in Hubei province and was shown a fossil that had been discovered by a farmer at a quarry near Jingzhou, not far from the Yangtze River.
The fossil had been encased within a rock which had been split down the middle, yielding the skeleton and impressions of it on both sides.
But it took years of patient work, using 3D scanning technology, to extract a complete, detailed view of the specimen.