Dryomomys
55 million
years ago
We've
now arrived at one of your very earliest precursors, Dryomomys. Something like this creature begot something that begot
something that, after that eternity of time, begot you—only time separates the two of you. Now, imagine if you could erase
that intervening eternity for a moment and meet your hugely distant forebear.
At a smidgen bigger than a mouse, this nearly eldest of all your elders would
fit snugly in the palm of your hand.
Your
Ancestor's Profile Dryomomys is the most primitive primate known from good fossil
material. (The first known primate, Purgatorius, dating back as far as 65 million years ago, is known only
from isolated teeth and jaw fragments.) The animal most like Dryomomys today is a wee being called the pen-tailed tree shrew. Dryomomys would have weighed about 1.3 ounces, roughly akin to that
of the smallest living primates, the mouse lemurs of Madagascar. Like its
cousin, the roughly contemporary but more advanced Carpolestes, the Dryomomys skeleton
that the reconstruction is based on was unearthed in Wyoming.
