Finger and toe fossils belonged to tiny primates 45 million years ago

The fossils provide further evidence that early anthropoids were minuscule creatures

At Northern Illinois University, Dan Gebo opens a cabinet and pulls out a drawer full of thin plastic cases filled with clear gelatin capsules. Inside each numbered capsule is a tiny fossil -- some are so small they rival the diminutive size of a mustard seed.

It's hard to imagine that anyone would be able to recognize these flecks as fossils, much less link them to an ancient world that was very different from our own, yet has quite a bit to do with us -- or the evolution of us.

The nearly 500 finger and toe bones belonged to tiny early primates -- some half the size of a mouse. During the mid-Eocene period, about 45 million years ago, they lived in tree canopies and fed on fruit and insects in a tropical rainforest in what is now China.

The fossilized phalanges are described in detail in a new study by Gebo and colleagues, published online this fall ahead of print in the Journal of Human Evolution.

Representing nine different taxonomic families of primates and as many as 25 species, the specimens include numerous fossils attributed to Eosimias, the very first anthropoid known to date, and three fossils attributed to a new and much more advanced anthropoid. The anthropoid lineage would later include monkeys, apes and humans.

"The fossils are extraordinarily small, but in terms of quantity this is the largest single assemblage of fossil primate finger and toe specimens ever recorded," said Gebo, an NIU professor of anthropology and biology who specializes in the study of primate anatomy.

All of the finger and toe fossils imply tree-dwelling primates with grasping digits in both hands and feet. Many of the smaller fossils are between 1 and 2 millimeters in length, and the animals would have ranged in full body size from 10 to 1,000 grams (0.35 to 35.3 ounces).

"The new study provides further evidence that early anthropoids were minuscule creatures, the size of a mouse or smaller," Gebo said. "It also adds to the evidence pointing toward Asia as the initial continent for primate evolution. While apes and fossil humans do come from Africa, their ancestors came from Asia."

The newly described fossils were originally recovered from a commercial quarry near the village of Shanghuang in the southern Jiangsu Province of China, about 100 miles west of Shanghai. In recent decades, Shanghuang has become well-known among paleontologists.

"Shanghuang is truly an amazingly diverse fossil primate locality, unequaled across the Eocene," Gebo said. "Because no existing primate communities show this type of body-size distribution, the Shanghuang primate fauna emphasizes that past ecosystems were often radically different from those we are familiar with today."

Co-author Christopher Beard, a paleontologist at the University of Kansas in Lawrence who has been working on Shanghuang fossils for 25 years, said the limestone in the quarry is of Triassic age -- from the very beginning of the Age of Dinosaurs some 220 million years ago. Owing to a subsequent phase of erosion, the limestone developed large fissures containing fossil-rich sediments dating to the middle Eocene, after dinosaurs went extinct.

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