Fossil Missing Link Ida -- Ain’t no Kin of Mine.

By Les Porter

Published online, before print on July 1, 2009, in Proceedings of the Royal Society B [Biology] the report, “A new primate from the Eocene Pondaung Formation of Myanmar and the monophyly of Burmese amphipithecids”< span>

By investigators:
K. Christopher Beard1,* Laurent Marivaux, Yaowalak Chaimanee, Jean-Jacques Jaeger, Bernard Marandat, Paul Tafforeau, Aung Naing Soe, Soe Thura Tun and Aung Aung Kyaw

And they report that the Missing Link “Ida” and her kin are NOT in the direct Human Linkage, so they can’t be the Missing Link!

Now look, Ida’s a mammal and all us mammals are kin – but they are suggesting Ida’s not directly in the human line of our kin and ken. Or so says K. Christopher Beard, at Carnegie Museum of Natural History [Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania].

The”new” fossil, a chunk of primate bone, from Asia – Myanmar, to be exact – shows Ida, [last month’s version of the revolutionary “missing link”] is “Not” even to be in the direct human chain. [Everybody knew that, anyway, since it looked like Ida succumbed or drowned or somehow met her demise likely before she had offspring. So she isn’t in the line, anyhow.]

Beard, et al., discovered the new “Missing Link” fossil – which is nowhere as near complete as the exquisite fossil of Ida, from Germany. In fact, it is “just” a jawbone with some interesting teeth, in particular a well-developed large canine tooth [hence their name for it Ganlea Megacanina] and they date the age of the fossil to be ~37 million years.

http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2009/06/29/rspb.2009.0836.abstract?sid=2997e1c5-7ac5-4c1e-a59e-22b2c2c11b72

Here is the Abstract from the report:

The family Amphipithecidae is one of the two fossil primate taxa from Asia that appear to be early members of the anthropoid clade. Ganlea megacanina, gen. et sp. nov., is a new amphipithecid from the late middle Eocene Pondaung Formation of central Myanmar. The holotype of Ganlea is distinctive in having a relatively enormous lower canine showing heavy apical wear, indicating an important functional role of the lower canine in food preparation and ingestion. A phylogenetic analysis of amphipithecid relationships suggests that Ganlea is the sister taxon of Myanmarpithecus, a relatively small-bodied taxon that has often, but not always, been included in Amphipithecidae. Pondaungia is the sister taxon of the Ganlea + Myanmarpithecus clade. All three Pondaung amphipithecid genera are monophyletic with respect to Siamopithecus, which is the most basal amphipithecid currently known. The inclusion of Myanmarpithecus in Amphipithecidae diminishes the likelihood that amphipithecids are specially related to adapiform primates. Extremely heavy apical wear has been documented on the lower canines of all three genera of Burmese amphipithecids. This distinctive wear pattern suggests that Burmese amphipithecids were an endemic radiation of hard object feeders that may have been ecological analogues of living New World pitheciin monkeys.

The last sentence refers to extant monkeys of the Amazon Basic [pitheciins] for which I have searched Wikipedia for the picture below.

White Faced Saki
Image Credit: Wikipedia Commons [New World Monkeys]

By the way, these new world monkeys were isolated from old world Africa before the Chicxulub event – and therefore likely grew their own path of parallel approaches to fruits and hard nuts.

Yeah. Rats in the past.

Siamopithecus, a fossil primate, is often thought of as the first “anthropoid.” They seemed to have been all over the area of southern Asia, and the Middle East and Africa.
http://www.ifi.uzh.ch/~zolli/res_db/siamo.htm

Now, when we was mice. . . .