A Filter That Shaped Evolution of Primates in Asia (1 of 3) (IMAGE)
Caption
The Eocene-Oligocene transition (EOT) functioned as a critical filtering episode during the evolutionary history of primates. Comparing the composition of the early Oligocene primate faunas from Asia reveals that surviving this Eocene-Oligocene evolutionary filter entailed a high degree of taxonomic and ecological selectivity: later Eocene primate assemblages tend to be dominated, both in terms of taxonomic richness and numerical abundance, by stem anthropoids, whereas the Oligocene primate tend to be dominated by lemur-like strepsirrhine primates. A similar comparison of the late Eocene-early Oligocene primates from Afro-Arabia shows a very different pattern of selectivity in response to the EOT: very few strepsirrhine primates survived the EOT, whereas anthropoids diversified both taxonomically and ecologically. The divergent responses shown by Afro-Arabian and Asian primates across the EOT evolutionary filter constrained the subsequent course of primate macroevolutionary pattern across the Old World. Africa became the geographic nexus of anthropoid evolution, whereas Asia shows a strong break between Paleogene and Neogene anthropoid assemblages. This material relates to a paper that appeared in the May 6, 2016 issue of Science, published by AAAS. The paper, by X. Ni at Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, China, and colleagues was titled, "Oligocene primates from China reveal divergence between African and Asian primate evolution."
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Xijun Ni
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