21-million year old teeth show monkey migration to North America

A fossil unearthed in the Panama Canal Basin has lead scientists to discover that monkeys entered North America much earlier than previously thought.

The fossil, discovered by researchers from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, as well as the University of Florida and New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science, is thought to belong to a species of monkey related to today’s capuchins and points to vast migration millions of years earlier than first thought.

The previous theory was that the monkeys did not migrate until after the formation of the Isthmus of Panama 3.5 million years ago, however, discovering this fossil has proved that this was not the case.

According to Nature, the monkeys travelled across the ocean from Africa to South America on vegetation ending up and colonizing in South America around 35-million years ago. Jonathan Bloch, a palaeontologist at the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville and who lead the study into the fossil, has found that the monkeys then crossed water barriers to North America almost 18-million years earlier than first thought.

“Somehow they made a transoceanic journey from Africa, then they dispersed throughout South America. Now we see that they, as far as we know, are the only mammal that successfully crossed the early Miocene Central American Seaway into present day Panama. So how were monkeys able to do this? Hopefully future fossil discoveries will help us better understand this extraordinary history.”

Although the expansion of the Panama canal lead to this extraordinary discovery, it has now set the timer for scientists to investigate and find more possible fossils that could provide further knowledge on how exactly mammal migration happened. Up until now there has been very little fossil evidence to show migration from South America to North America.