ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2015
Oldest known euarchontan tarsals and affinities of Paleocene Purgatorius to Primates.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 21 papers.
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21 citing papers in PubMed.
- Powerful or non-powerful? Revisiting hallucal grasping as a key evolutionary innovation in small arboreal mammals.iScience · 2026Article
- New remarkably complete skeleton of Mixodectes reveals arboreality in a large Paleocene primatomorphan mammal following the Cretaceous-Paleogene mass extinction.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Primate social organization evolved from a flexible pair-living ancestor.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Basicranial evidence suggests picrodontid mammals are not stem primates.Biology letters · 2024Article
- The oldest semi-aquatic beaver in the world and a new hypothesis for the evolution of locomotion in Castoridae.Royal Society open science · 2022Article
- Ecological selectivity and the evolution of mammalian substrate preference across the K-Pg boundary.Ecology and evolution · 2021Article
- Developmental influence on evolutionary rates and the origin of placental mammal tooth complexity.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Tarsal morphology of ischyromyid rodents from the middle Eocene of China gives an insight into the group's diversity in Central Asia.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Quantitative assessment of tarsal morphology illuminates locomotor behaviour in Palaeocene mammals following the end-Cretaceous mass extinction.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Earliest Palaeocene purgatoriids and the initial radiation of stem primates.Royal Society open science · 2021Article
- The Making of Calibration Sausage Exemplified by Recalibrating the Transcriptomic Timetree of Jawed Vertebrates.Frontiers in genetics · 2021Article
- Article
- Inferring the mammal tree: Species-level sets of phylogenies for questions in ecology, evolution, and conservation.PLoS biology · 2019Article
- Oldest ctenodactyloid tarsals from the Eocene of China and evolution of locomotor adaptations in early rodents.BMC evolutionary biology · 2018Article
- Using Phylogenomic Data to Explore the Effects of Relaxed Clocks and Calibration Strategies on Divergence Time Estimation: Primates as a Test Case.Systematic biology · 2018Article
- Comparison of musculoskeletal networks of the primate forelimb.Scientific reports · 2017Article
- Oldest skeleton of a plesiadapiform provides additional evidence for an exclusively arboreal radiation of stem primates in the Palaeocene.Royal Society open science · 2017Article
- Resolving the relationships of Paleocene placental mammals.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2017Article
- Genomic analysis reveals hidden biodiversity within colugos, the sister group to primates.Science advances · 2016Article
- Life history of the most complete fossil primate skeleton: exploring growth models for Darwinius.Royal Society open science · 2015Article
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4 authors.
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Abstract
Earliest Paleocene Purgatorius often is regarded as the geologically oldest primate, but it has been known only from fossilized dentitions since it was first described half a century ago. The dentition of Purgatorius is more primitive than those of all known living and fossil primates, leading some researchers to suggest that it lies near the ancestry of all other primates; however, others have questioned its affinities to primates or even to placental mammals. Here we report the first (to our knowledge) nondental remains (tarsal bones) attributed to Purgatorius from the same earliest Paleocene deposits that have yielded numerous fossil dentitions of this poorly known mammal. Three independent phylogenetic analyses that incorporate new data from these fossils support primate affinities of Purgatorius among euarchontan mammals (primates, treeshrews, and colugos). Astragali and calcanei attributed to Purgatorius indicate a mobile ankle typical of arboreal euarchontan mammals generally and of Paleocene and Eocene plesiadapiforms specifically and provide the earliest fossil evidence of arboreality in primates and other euarchontan mammals. Postcranial specializations for arboreality in the earliest primates likely played a key role in the evolutionary success of this mammalian radiation in the Paleocene.
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