The latest Nature headlines from the Chinese Academy of Sciences


An international team of researchers led by the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences claimed to have discovered the world's oldest fossil primate skeleton. This animal lived about 55 million years ago, and is smaller than the smallest primate pygmy mouse lemur. The researchers named the new specimen "Archicebus-achilles", which was excavated from an ancient lake bed near the modern Yangtze River channel in Hubei Province, central China.

This nearly complete new fossil is not only the oldest known primate skeleton, but also essential to elucidate a key event in the evolution of primates and humans: evolution into modern monkeys, apes and humans The divergence between the lineage (collectively called the great ape) and the lineage that evolved into tarsiers.

Xijun Ni, a scientist and chief researcher at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said: "The Akhalyu monkey marks the first time we have obtained a primate that is close to the difference between a tarsier and apes The complete picture. It represents a major step forward in our efforts to analyze the earliest stages of primate and human evolution. "

In order to study the complete fossils, the scientific team scanned the samples at a world-leading level of detail and compared them with the most advanced high-energy X-ray equipment of the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF). The scanning research team completed the three-dimensional digital reconstruction of the fossils at ESRF and was able to study the intricate details of the small brittle bones of the Akhalyuski monkey.

The bones of the Akhalyski monkey are 7 million years earlier than the oldest known fossil primate bones. It belongs to a completely independent branch of the primate evolutionary tree, which is closer to the evolution of the lineage of modern monkeys, apes and humans.

Christopher Beard, a paleontologist at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, said: "The Akhalyu monkey is completely different from any other primate known in the scientific community, whether it is alive or fossil. It looks like a strange hybrid , With the feet of a small monkey, arms, legs, and teeth of very primitive primates, and a pair of surprisingly small eyes on the original head. It will force us to rewrite the evolutionary history of the ape lineage. "

The debate about the evolutionary relationship between primates and their potential close relatives has been intense for many years.

"In order to test different hypotheses and determine the phylogenetic location of this new primate, we developed a huge data matrix that includes more than 1,000 anatomical features and scored 157 mammals," Jin Meng, head of the Department of Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History, said. The results of statistical analysis indicate that the weight of an adult Akureysi monkey is approximately 20-30 grams. Its small size and its very bottom evolutionary position support this view: the earliest primates, like the common ancestors of tarsiers and great apes, are extremely small. This has overturned some previous scientific views, arguing that the earliest members of the great ape lineage are larger and comparable to modern monkeys.

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