ANT 301 Lecture Notes - Lecture 14: Deep Sea Drilling Project, Ellesmere Island, List Of Fossil Primates
Document Summary
But first: sometimes two species share a trait because the trait evolved independently in the two species (i. e. , the feature evolved more than one time) called homoplasy. Homoplasy --> parallelism (e. g. ancestor had no wings but had forelimbs) Homoplasy --> convergence (ancestor had no wings, no forelimbs, no exoskeleton) Last time: primates probably originated in east or southeast asia. But: lousy fossil record from e and se asia following the k-pg (paleocene epoch) Earliest definite fossil primates first appear in the fossil record: at the beginning of the eocene epoch (56-34 ma, nearly simultaneously in n. america, europe, asia. This appearance linked to climate change: global temperatures over the last 66 million years (cenozoic era); reconstructed using oxygen isotopes. Earth was a lot warmer long time ago. Stable isotopes of oxygen: o18 is rare, heavy, o16 is most common, light, ratio of heavy to light oxygen, oxygen isotopes measured in caco3 shells of tiny marine plankton.
