Banner year for ancient Old World Monkeys.
CARTA Member, Prof. Nina Jablonski (PennState), and her international colleagues have had a fruitful year publishing on the increasingly complicated history of the catarrhines (aka "Old World Monkeys") in Asia. This research, which centers on a new species of colobine (leaf-eating monkey), Mesopithecus, was featured today in PennState News: "Oldest monkeys fossils outside of Africa found" (Messer, A. E. 13 Oct. 2020), and demonstrates that these monkeys were living at the same time and place as endemic apes, and likely were ancestral to the monkeys that live in Asia today.
Related research articles:
Jablonski, N. G., Ji, X., Kelley, J., Flynn, L. J., Deng, C., & Su, D. F. (2020). Mesopithecus pentelicus from Zhaotong, China, the easternmost representative of a widespread Miocene cercopithecoid species. Journal of Human Evolution, 146, 102851. doi:10.1016/j.jhevol.2020.102851
Ji, X., Youlatos, D., Jablonski, N. G., Pan, R., Zhang, C., Li, P., . . . Li, S. (2020). Oldest colobine calcaneus from East Asia (Zhaotong, Yunnan, China). Journal of Human Evolution, 147, 102866. doi:10.1016/j.jhevol.2020.102866
Khan, M. A., Kelley, J., Flynn, L. J., Babar, M. A., & Jablonski, N. G. (2020). New fossils of Mesopithecus from Hasnot, Pakistan. Journal of Human Evolution, 145, 102818. doi:10.1016/j.jhevol.2020.102818
Li, P., Zhang, C., Kelley, J., Deng, C., Ji, X., Jablonski, N. G., . . . Zhu, R. (2020). Late Miocene climate cooling contributed to the disappearance of hominoids in Yunnan Region, Southwestern China. Geophysical Research Letters, 47(11), e2020GL087741. doi:10.1029/2020gl087741
To learn more about Prof. Jablonski and her research, please visit her CARTA profile:
