Early Arrival and Climatically-Linked Geographic Expansion of New World Monkeys from Tiny African Ancestors.

ABSTRACT: New World Monkeys (NWM) (platyrrhines) are one of the most diverse groups of primates, occupying today a wide range of ecosystems in the American tropics and exhibiting large variations in ecology, morphology, and behavior. Although the relationships among the almost 200 living species are relatively well understood, we lack robust estimates of the timing of origin, ancestral morphology, and geographic range evolution of the clade. Herein, we integrate paleontological and molecular evidence to assess the evolutionary dynamics of extinct and extant platyrrhines. We develop novel analytical frameworks to infer the evolution of body mass, changes in latitudinal ranges through time, and species diversification rates using a phylogenetic tree of living and fossil taxa. Our results show that pla

SUBMITTER: Silvestro D 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6292484 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature