Ekgmowechashala is a poorly documented but very distinctive species of ancient primate that lived in western North America during the Early Oligocene epoch, some 30 million years ago.
“Our project focuses on a very distinctive fossil primate known to paleontologists since the 1960s,” said Kathleen Rust, a doctoral candidate with Biodiversity Institute and Natural History Museum at the University of Kansas.
“Due to its unique morphology and its representation only by dental remains, its place on the mammalian evolutionary tree has been a subject of contention and debate.”
“There’s been a prevailing consensus leaning towards its classification as a primate. But the timing and appearance of this primate in the North American fossil record are quite unusual.”
“It appears suddenly in the fossil record of the Great Plains more than 4 million years after the extinction of all other North American primates, which occurred around 34 million years ago.”
In the 1990s, University of Kansas Professor Chris Beard collected fossils from the Nadu Formation in the Baise Basin in Guangxi, China, that closely resembled the Ekgmowechashala material known from North America.
By that time, Ekgmowechashala was notoriously enigmatic among North American paleontologists.
“When we were working there, we had absolutely no idea that we would find an animal that was closely related to this bizarre primate from North America, but literally as soon as I picked up the jaw and saw it, I thought, ‘Wow, this is it’,” Professor Beard said.
“It’s not like it took a long time, and we had to undertake all kinds of detailed analysis — we knew what it was.”
“We have some critical fossils, including what is still by far the best upper molar of Ekgmowechashala known from North America. That upper molar is so distinctive and looks quite similar to the one from China that we found that it kind of seals the deal.”
The authors conducted the morphological analysis…
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