Million Year Old Monkey

A million-year-old monkey fossil found underwater in cave.

16:33 15 September 2015

Scientists have found a fossil of a monkey believed to be at least one million years old. The primate, known as Antilllothrix bernensis, lived in the Dominican Republic and seemed unchanged on an island and disappeared just as human arrived in the 16th century.

 

Helen Green, a lead researcher who works on dating the limestone around the fossils, said:

 

“The presence of endemic new world monkeys on the Caribbean islands is one the great questions of bio-geography and our work on these fossils shows Antillothrix existed on Hispaniola relatively morphologically unchanged for over a million years.”

 

“By establishing the age of these fossils we have changed the understanding of primate evolution in this region.”