Astounding Facts About Primates that Never Cease to Amaze

2. Primates have been around since the time of the dinosaurs.
Dinosaurs ruled the earth up until about 65 million years ago, until an event known as the KT impact, an asteroid collision that most likely happened around Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, caused them to become extinct. However, dinosaurs were far from the only animals that roamed the planet, and some tiny mammals lived during their reign. About the KT impact, a new kind of mammal evolved that scientists consider the first identifiable primate-like creature. It was known as Purgatorious, was about the size of a mouse, and maybe the ancestor of the primates that evolved during the later Cenozoic Era.

Genetic sequencing is something that biologists do to try to understand the genetic makeup of individuals are species. Researchers have used genetic sequencing to determine that the earliest primate may have actually lived 20 million years before Purgatorious. However, fossil evidence of this proto-primate has yet to be uncovered. Two similar creatures evolved around 10 million after Purgatorious that scientists identify as the first true primates. The first is known as Archicebus and lived in Asia, and the second was known as Plesiadapis and lived in North America and Europe. Archicebus and Plesiadapis were much more anatomically similar to today’s primates.