Date: March 11, 2019
The teeth
of a new fossil monkey, unearthed in the badlands of northwest Kenya, help fill
a 6-million-year void in Old World monkey evolution, according to a study by
U.S. and Kenyan scientists published in the Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences.
The
discovery of 22-million-year-old fossilized monkey teeth -- described as
belonging to a new species, Alophia metios -- fills a void between a
previously discovered 19-million-year-old fossil tooth in Uganda and a
25-million-year-old fossil tooth found in Tanzania. The finding also sheds
light on how their diet may have changed the course of their evolution.
"For
a group as highly successful as the monkeys of Africa and Asia, it would seem
that scientists would have already figured out their evolutionary
history," said the study's corresponding author John Kappelman, an
anthropology and geology professor at The University of Texas at Austin.
"Although the isolated tooth from Tanzania is important for documenting
the earliest occurrence of monkeys, the next 6 million years of the group's
existence are one big blank. This new monkey importantly reveals what happened
during the group's later evolution."
Since the
time interval from 19 to 25 million years ago is represented by a small number
of African fossil sites, the team targeted the famous fossil-rich region of
West Turkana to try to fill in that blank.
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