In a strange twist of evolutionary history, the ancestors of modern South American monkeys such as the capuchin and woolly monkeys first came to the New World by floating across the Atlantic Ocean on mats of vegetation and earth. According to a new study, they were not the only primates to make the trip. A fossil find in Peru suggests that a different, entirely extinct family of primates undertook the same kind of oceanic voyage more than 30 million years ago.
On the banks of Río Yurúa, close to the border of Peru and Brazil, University of Southern California paleontologist Erik Seiffert documented a fossil site that contains a mix of the strange and familiar. Here, roughly 32 million-year-old rock preserves the remains of bats, relatives of capybaras, and early New World monkeys. They also found evidence of a second primate group, one thought to have lived only in Africa.
Seiffert and colleagues propose the primate teeth they found in Peru belonged to a now-extinct group of monkeys called parapithecids. To a casual observer, Seiffert says, these primates would have looked somewhat similar to today’s New World monkeys. “It’s only when we look into the details of the teeth, crania, and long bones that we see there are important differences,” he notes, with the arrangement of bumps and troughs on the teeth acting as a reliable guide to which fossil belonged to which family.
Back then, during a time known as the Late Eocene, Africa and South America were significantly closer. The span of the Atlantic Ocean between the two continents measured about 930 to 1,300 miles apart compared to the modern expanse of 1,770 miles. In addition, the buildup of glaciers in Antarctica around that time caused sea levels to drop, making the passage shorter than it is today. During this window of prehistory, the path between the continents was passable by sea.
The type of raft that might have made the journey.
https://youtu.be/_OwfGunvPXA
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/monkeys-raft-across-atlantic-twice-180974637/
