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Article: Monkey skull key to evolutionary puzzle.(20 million-year-old monkey skull found in Andes Mountains of Chile)
- Article from:
- USA TODAY
- Article date:
- June 1, 1995
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1995 Society for the Advancement of Education. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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The oldest known and most complete skull of an extinct South American monkey has been discovered high in the Andes Mountains of Chile. The find provides a missing piece in the puzzle of evolution and clues to what the environment was like in South America at the time.
The 20,000,000-year-old skull represents a new species and is amazingly well-preserved - with both eye sockets and every tooth in the upper jaw intact. It helps to fill a huge gap in the knowledge of the fossil record of New World monkeys.
"All of the primate fossils from South America wouldn't even fill a baseball cap," notes John J. Flynn, chairman of the Department of Geology and curator of ...