CATOPITHECUS

From Philosopedia

CATOPITHECUS In 1992, an ancient and extinct animal known as Catopithecus was first reported to Dr. Elwyn Simons of Duke University.

This is the earliest animal known from the higher primates, the group that humans, apes, and monkey are in,” Simons has declared. According to an analysis of skull, jaw, and teeth fossils found in what now is an Egyptian desert, this oldest ancestor of apes, monkey, and humans was a squirrel-size animal that lived 36,000,000 years ago. Simons said he had no doubt about his find because of the distinctive features of the Catopithecus fossils: shovel-shaped front upper teeth; a skull with a flattened face; forward-looking eye sockets, and a fused forehead bone. In lower primates, like lemurs, this forehead bone is separated. If his interpretation is accepted, higher primates, like gorillas, chimpanzees, and humans all evolved from this tiny animal.

Meanwhile, Dr. Bert Covert of the University of Colorado at Boulder notes that specimens found in China and Algeria were older but were “extremely fragmentary” and that their species classification was uncertain. “Simons’s material is between plausible and compelling” as the oldest higher primate fossil, Covert reported in a 1995 issue of Science, the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. “The other material I would place between unlikely and plausible. We cannot resolve the issue right now.”