The Aquatic Ape Theory• Really??

HAPPY HALLOWEEN

• Mermaids: The Body Found…

Ancestor to Primates?

• What is ancestral to all the critters under the Order Primates?

• Where all the humans, australopithicines, monkeys, apes, homo habilis, tarsiers, lorises, aye-ayes, Neandertals, etc. came from…

Primates Review

Me too!

*Go back to the chart on pg. 129

The end of the Cretaceous period 65.5 mya

• Millions of years ago right after the dinosaurs died…

Paleocene 65 myaPlacental mammal radiation

• Earliest primates

Eocene 55-35mya

• More than 200 recognized fossil primate species.

Eocene 55-35 mya

• More than 200 recognized fossil species.

Darwinius, from the Messel site in Germany, discovered in 2009

and dates to ~47 mya.

Eocene Primates

• Foramen magnum position = whether the body is habitually horizontal (like a horse) or vertical (like a monkey).

• During the Eocene, the foramen magnum in some primate species was beginning to move from the back of the skull towards the center.

• Suggesting…Holding their bodies erect while hopping and sitting, like modern lemurs, galagos, and tarsiers.

Eocene Era primate and modern human skulls

Oligocene

• “Rafting” Africa-> South America ~34 mya early in the Oligocene

• By this early point in the Oligocene, continental drift had separated the New World from the Old World.

• New and Old World monkeys branch off here, 35 million years ago.

Oligocene• Approximate position of the continents during the beginning of the

Oligocene

Oligocene Primates from Fayum

• Apidium – Primitive dental

arrangement suggests near or before evolutionary divergence of Old and New World anthropoids

– Small, squirrel-like fruit and seed eating, adept at leaping and springing

Walking with the Beasts (BBC) “Whale

Killer”

EgyptEgypt’’s Fayums Fayum

• Today, itToday, it’’s a ~550 square s a ~550 square mile lush mile lush ““oasisoasis”” basin in basin in the desert south of Cairothe desert south of Cairo

• During the Eocene and During the Eocene and Oligocene, the Faiyum was Oligocene, the Faiyum was forrestedforrested

• At the beginning of the At the beginning of the Miocene, the Faiyum had Miocene, the Faiyum had become a dry hollowbecome a dry hollow