30 Million Year Old Ancient Primate Discovered In North America- Ekgmowechashala

[Prehistory Resurrection]

Link to article: https://www.sci.news/paleontology/ekgmowechashala-12425.html

[EmperorDinobot]

The article forgets to mention that the one other location in NA where they've found Ekgmowechashala is Oregon.

[VD231991]

Ekgmowechashala was first described to science in a paper published by James MacDonald in 1963 on the basis of fossils found in the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, an Oglala Sioux reservation in South Dakota. The name Ekgmowechashala means "little cat man" in Sioux because MacDonald visualized this critter as having the tail of a cat and the head of an anthropoid (the Sioux people didn't know that non-anthropoid primates once lived in North America, and thus Edward Drinker Cope and Joseph Leidy get the credit for having demonstrated that North America boasted non-anthropoid, non-platyrrhine primates in the Paleogene). The paper mentioned in the news article cited in the posted link describes a new primate closely related to Ekgmowechashala, Palaeohodites, although that taxon is the second member of Ekgmowechashalidae to be named from China (the other being Gatanthropus). Ni et al. (2016) also recover Bugtilemur from Pakistan and Muangthanhinius from Thailand as ekgmowechashalids, and because Bugtilemur is from the early Oligocene, it is apparent that South Asia was a refugium for multiple prosimian lineages that had to adapt to climatic changes after the Eocene in the Holarctic region.

MacDonald, J.R., 1963. The Miocene faunas from the Wounded Knee area of western South Dakota. Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 125: 139–238. hdl:2246/1259.

Ni, X., Li, Q., Li, L., and Beard, K. C., 2016. Oligocene primates from China reveal divergence between African and Asian primate evolution. Science 352 (6286): 673–677. doi:10.1126/science.aaf2107.