Date: October 6, 2016
Source: Washington University in
St. Louis
Small enough to fit into the palm
of your hand, with enormous eyes and an appetite for meat, tarsiers are an
anomaly of nature. They are also our distant cousins, according to scientists
at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, who recently
sequenced and analyzed the tarsier genome.
The findings, published Oct. 6 in
Nature Communications, place tarsiers on an important branch of the primate
evolutionary tree -- along the same branch that leads to monkeys, great apes
and humans.
"We sequenced the tarsier
not only to determine where they fit in primate evolution, but because their
physiology, anatomy and feeding behavior are very unique," said Wesley
Warren, PhD, an associate professor of genetics and the study's senior author.
Tarsiers are the only exclusively
carnivorous primate, eating insects and small birds, rodents and lizards. With
eyes twice as big as their brains, a head that can rotate 180 degrees in each
direction and the ability to track prey using ultrasound, the tiny animals are
formidable nocturnal hunters. Their legs and feet are adapted for sudden,
powerful leaps, with an elongated ankle bone, the tarsus, for which they are
named.
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