Primates Appeared Almost Immediately After Dinosaurs Went Extinct, New Research Suggests - Gizmodo

rex fossils has now yielded the oldest evidence of primates in the fossil record, in what is being hailed a significant discovery.

Jawbones and an assortment of teeth found in the Hell’s Creek formation of northeastern Montana are the oldest primate fossils ever discovered, according to new research published in Royal Society Open Science.

Prior to this discovery, the oldest evidence of stem, or early, primates in the fossil record dated back to the first 300,000 to 500,000 years of the Paleocene (the epoch that followed the Mesozoic).

Both species belong to Purgatorius, the oldest known genus associated with primates.

ceratops, and they’re all considered plesiadapiforms—a stem group of primates that includes Purgatorius and from which all modern primates like monkeys, apes (you included), and lemurs are descended.

Three teeth with traits not seen before in Purgatorius allowed the scientists to declare the discovery of a new species.

As paleontologists, we can trace this combination of traits to extinct primates from the earliest Eocene about 56 million years ago.

But as you move further back in time to the earliest Paleocene about 66 million years ago, it’s clear that our earliest primate relatives like Purgatorius had some, but not all, of these traits.

This combination of traits allowed our earliest primate relatives to separate themselves from their competition just after the demise of the dinosaurs.

These traits, it would seem, allowed Purgatorius to “grow and become a major part of the terrestrial ecosystem within one million years following the mass extinction event,” he added.

Because maps are cool and to get a feeling of what northeastern Montana may have been like circa 65.9 million years ago, an awesome website with lots and lots of awesome interpretive maps called Deep Time Maps is here: