As long-lost cousins go, he wouldn't take up much room at the Christmas dining table.

The size of a mouse and 55 million years old, the nearly complete, articulated skeleton of a newly-discovered tree-dwelling primate has been given a mighty name - Archicebus Achilles, not after the Greek hero exactly, but the long heel bone that marks him as almost one of us.

The slender-limbed, long-tailed primate was about the size of todays Pygmy Mouse Lemur and would have weighed between 20 and 30 grams.

The oldest primate skeleton ever discovered was recovered from Hubei Province in central China, lending further weight to the theory that primate evolution didn't originate in Africa, as has long been believed.

Northern Illinois University anthropologist Dan Gebo — a member of the international team on paleontologists that discovered little Achilles — told e! Science News: "This is the oldest primate skeleton of this quality and completeness ever discovered and one of the most primitive primate fossils ever documented."