Monkeys who sailed 900 miles across the Atlantic
INTREPID monkeys made an improbable sea voyage from Africa to South America on a raft 34million years ago, a study claims.
the stunning conclusion comes after scientists discovered fossilised monkey teeth deep in the Amazon jungle – which were remarkably similar to specimens found in Egypt.
the likeness between the molars led researchers to believe the extinct primate species must have migrated from Africa, but the question was: how?
One logical explanation, they decided, is the explorer monkeys made the 900-mile trip across the ocean on floating rafts of vegetation that had broken away from coastlines, possibly during a storm.
It seems that the conditions were just right for an adventure – because the scientists believe the monkeys travelled when the sea level had fallen due to the Antarctic ice sheet building up.
Professor Erik Seiffert, who led the study by the University of Southern California, said: ‘the thing that strikes me about this study more than any other I’ve been involved in is just how improbable all of it is.
‘the fact that it’s this remote site in the middle of nowhere, that the chances of finding these pieces is extremely small, and that we’re revealing this very improbable journey made by these early monkeys, it’s all quite remarkable.’
he suggested the primates made the journey during the Eocene-Oligocene Boundary, which is when the Antarctic became covered in ice and the sea level dropped.
‘that might have played a role in making it a bit easier for these primates to actually get across the Atlantic Ocean,’ he added.
the extinct monkey, found in what is now Peru, has been named Ucayalipithecus perdita, after Ucayali, which is where the teeth were discovered; pithikos, the Greek word for monkey; and perdita, Latin for lost.
the team said the species would have been ‘very small’ – probably quite similar in size to a modernday marmoset. Based on the age of the Amazonian site and the similarity of the teeth to fossils in Egypt, the researchers estimated that the migration might have occurred 34million years ago.
When Professor Seiffert was asked to help describe the fossils in 2016, he noticed the similarity of the two broken upper molars to the ancient monkey species from Egypt that he studied previously.
‘Easier for primates to get across’