Tales of the Cenozoic
11:13 pm
A couple of links from the Age of Mammals:
First up, Debby Cotter Kaspari shows off her excellent painting of the gigantic camel Megatylopus, enlarged to its mind-boggling life-size for an exhibit at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History. Kaspari’s blog, Drawing the Motmot, is a must-read for anyone interested in the art of natural science.
Afarensis’ “Friday Primate” this past week was the Dryomomys szalayi, a Late Paleocene plesiadapiform from the Clarks Fork Basin of Wyoming. Plesiadapiforms were squirrely little tree-dwellers that evolved shortly after the dinosaurs went extinct. Their exact relationships have been hard to pinpoint, but the recently-described skeletons of D. szalayi and the contemporary plesiadapiform Ignacius clarkforkensis have led researchers to conclude that plesiadapiforms were true primates. This makes them some of the earliest known members of our own mammalian order, and should help shed some light on how primates first evolved. Additional resources about this story can be found at Anthropology.net and Palaeoblog.
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