NIU prof on team that found oldest primate skeleton By Emily McFarlan Miller emcfarlan@stmedianetwork June 5, 2013 12:28PM 0 0 Share 15 Northern Illinois University anthropologist Dan Gebo Elgin. | Phocourtesy NIU Updated: June 6, 2013 2:29AM An international team of paleontologists has discovered the oldest-known primate skeleton in what team member Dan Gebo of Elgin says represents “a little window into what was going on 50 million years ago, long before humans were even a glimmer.” The Eocene epoch fossil was recovered from Hubei Province in central China, according to an announcement Wednesday. It’s a nearly complete skeleton of a tiny, tree-dwelling primate with long feet and an even longer tail, according to Gebo, an anthropologist at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb. “If you change just a couple little pieces of its anatomy, it may well be where we started from, and that’s kind of weird because it’s pretty different from us,” Gebo said. “It’s so tiny. He’s running around, catching insects and eating fruit. It’s so small, so it has this huge metabolic rate, so it’s going to be starving all the time and have to find food. It’s probably not very social.” The team’s findings were made public in an article in the June 6 issue of the prestigious science journal Nature. The fossil, named “Archicebus achilles,” actually was found inside a rock about a decade ago by Xijun Ni of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, Gebo said. Ni had met some farmers in the area who had found a number of small fossils in the quarry. When they split apart the rock in which Archicebus was hiding, looking for more fossils, “they realized it was something interesting,” he said. “It’s so tiny, you can’t ... get the fossils away from the rock. We could see a good chunk of it, but we couldn’t see all the things we wanted to see. That delayed us,” he said. The team took the skeleton first to the University of Texas for a micro-CT scan, then to the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France, according to the anthropologist. “It’s kind of a funny story where on one side, you have the low-tech paleontologists, digging up fossils and looking at them,” he said. “On the other hand, you’re in Grenoble, France, with people like NASA doing all the technical stuff to get a look at this primate.” Evolution link Those scans revealed “a mosaic type of anatomy,” Gebo said. It has the feet of a small monkey, the anthropologist’s area of expertise. The arms, legs and teeth are of a very primitive primate; and it had a primitive skull with small eyes, according to Northern Illinois University. That meant scientists had to make a decision whether Archicebus was a direct ancestor of tarsiers or arthropoids, like humans, the anthropologist said. They put it in the line of tarsiers; but, he said, “even though it’s not our direct ancestor, it’s such a close link to our lineage it actually tells us something about the very beginning of what I would call anthropoid evolution, the evolution of monkeys, apes and humans.” The primate skeleton is unusual, too, because it’s so complete. Scientists otherwise only have found primate teeth, jaws, the occasional skulls and a few limb bones from the same Eocene epoch period, he said. “It’s as old as any of the oldest known fossils, but it’s far more complete,” he said. And it’s just 3 inches from head to rump, with long feet that suggest it would be a good leaper and a tail 1½ times that length. Archicebus probably weighed less than an ounce, he said. A reconstruction drawn by NIU undergraduate Mat Severson shows the primate with long, reddish fur, gripping a tree branch. “It’s just kind of a novel little thing because it’s just so different from what people are used to seeing,” he said. This is Gebo’s third article published in Nature, he said. Other authors on the article include Ni; Marian Dagosto of the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University in Chicago; K. Christopher Beard of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh; Jin Meng and John Flynn of the American Museum of Natural History in New York; and Paul Tafforeau of the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France. Funding for their study was provided by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the National Basic Research Program of China, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the U.S. National Science Foundation, the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility and the American Museum of Natural History.
Posted on: Thu, 06 Jun 2013 15:47:26 +0000