

Researchers uncovered the 55.8 million year-old fossil remains of a tiny monkey, the oldest primate ever found in Europe or North America, near the coast of Mississippi.

The discovery sheds light both on the origins of monkeys in North America and on the conditions of the continent during the massive global warming of 55 million years ago. It suggests that primates came across a land-bridge that once connected Asia and Alaska, where conditions were tropical.

"These primates only inhabited tropical and subtropical forests. Wet, muggy, warm climates,"

said Chris Beard, lead researcher on the discovery and a paleontologist at Carnegie Mellon Natural History Museum. "That tells you a lot about the Bering land itself, indirectly. Think about Costa Rica in Alaska."

The primate migration occurred during what is known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, a warming of the Earth that Beard described as "one of the only times in history where the rate and magnitude (of global warming) is similar to what's happening today."

The Earth's continental structures, however, looked very different from how they do today. For a brief time, 55.8 million years ago, North America was connected to both Europe and Asia by narrow strips of land.

That led some scientists to theorize that primates migrated to North America from Europe via the land connecting Scotland with Greenland. Beard said that his finding rules out this migratory flow because primates had already colonized North America when the Europe-North America land-bridge opened.

Beard published his findings on the newly named primate, Teilhardina magnoliana, today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

If you took a look at the one-ounce primate and immediately wanted one as a pet, the closest animal you could find in today's world is one of Madagascar's mouse lemurs. (But they're very seriously endangered, so you can't have one.)

Image: Mark A. Klingler/CMNH