Picture of primate common ancestor coming into focus - Daily Science and Technology News

Picture of primate common ancestor coming into focus - Daily Science and Technology News

The earliest primate was a little, solitary tree denizen that enjoyed the night life. Those ar just a few conclusions from new reconstructions of the primate common relative, given Gregorian calendar month twenty seven at the annual meeting of the Society of paleontology.

Eva Hoffman, currently a college boy at the University of Lone-Star State at state capital, and colleagues at university checked out behavioural and ecological information from 178 fashionable primate species. Examining patterns of traits across the primate tribe, the researchers inferred the foremost possible characteristics of relatives at totally different branching points within the tree — all the method back to the common ancestor.

This ancient primate, which can have lived some eighty million to seventy million years agone, was in all probability no larger than a guinea pig, lived alone and gave birth to at least one offspring at a time, the researchers counsel. Living in trees and active in the dead of night, the animal in all probability ventured bent on the ends of tree branches to eat fruits, leaves and insects.

But this mixture of traits in all probability didn’t arise in primates, Hoffman says. when adding tree shrews and colugos — primates’ nearest living relatives — to the analysis, the researchers finished these same attributes were additionally gift within the 3 groups’ common relative. thus explanations of early primate evolution that trust these options got to be reconsidered, Hoffman says