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1 Primate Origins and Supraordinal Relationships: Morphological Evidence

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Handbook of Paleoanthropology

Abstract

There are five major scenarios that have been advanced to account for the early events in the origination of the order Primates: a transition from terrestriality to arboreality, the adoption of a grasp-leaping mode of locomotion, the evolution of features for visual predation, an adaptation to terminal branch feeding occurring during angiosperm diversification, or a combination involving terminal branch feeding followed by visual predation. These hypotheses are assessed using both neontological and fossil data. Of the five scenarios, the angiosperm diversification hypothesis is not contradicted by modern data and is found to be the most consistent with the fossil record. In particular, the evolution of features for manual grasping and dental processing of fruit in the earliest primates (primitive plesiadapiforms), and the subsequent development of features for better grasping and more intense frugivory in the common ancestor of Euprimates and Plesiadapoidea, is consistent with a close relationship between early primate and angiosperm evolution. All the other scenarios are less consistent with the pattern of trait acquisition through time observed in the fossil record. Consideration of non-euprimates (e.g., scandentians and plesiadapiforms) is found to be essential to viewing primate origins as an evolutionary process rather than as an event.

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Acknowledgments

Our thanks to P.D. Gingerich, K.D. Rose, F.S. Szalay, A.C. Walker, and J.G. Fleagle for conversations relevant to this chapter. We thank Annette Zitzmann for providing the photo of Ptilocercus in Figure 1.1 . Research was funded by grants from NSERC, Wenner-Gren, the Paleobiological Fund, Sigma Xi, NSF (SBR-9815884), and the University of Winnipeg to MTS; NSF (BCS-0129601) to G.F. Gunnell, P.D. Gingerich, and JIB; NSF (SBR-9616194), Field Museum of Natural History, Sigma Xi, and the Yale University Social Science Faculty Research Fund to EJS; 2002 NSFGRF to DMB.

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  1. Mary T. Silcox
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  2. Eric J. Sargis
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  3. Jonathan I. Bloch
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  4. Doug M. Boyer
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Silcox, M.T., Sargis, E.J., Bloch, J.I., Boyer, D.M. (2007). 1 Primate Origins and Supraordinal Relationships: Morphological Evidence. In: Handbook of Paleoanthropology. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-33761-4_29

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