Sixty-six million years ago, a massive asteroid smashed into Earth. Life has undergone at least five mass extinctions in the last 500 million years, but this one particularly stands out. It wiped out ...

Three tiny Purgatorius teeth found in Colorado are helping scientists trace how early primates evolved and spread across North America.

Researchers have unearthed the tiny, fossilized teeth of the earliest-known relative of primates, pushing its range further south than ever before and giving us new insights into how it spread through ...

A few teeth, smaller than a grain of rice, are changing the map of your earliest primate relatives. They come from a creature called Purgatorius, a tiny tree-dwelling mammal that lived about 66 ...

A monkey descending a tree trunk often keeps its head up, moving almost like a cautious climber backing down a ladder. Squirrels and many other mammals, by contrast, tend to go headfirst.

WASHINGTON — One of the earliest primates lived in trees and relied more on smell than vision, a new study indicates. A tiny cousin of the earliest ancestors of humans lived 54 million years ago in ...

Tiny, tooth-sized fossils have just reshaped the story of our deepest ancestry. Paleontologists have discovered the southernmost remains ever found of Purgatorius—the earliest-known relative of all ...

This photograph shows two species from the study by Toussaint et al. – a raccoon (Procyon lotor) and mongoose lemur (Eulemur mongoz) – climbing on vertical supports. Researchers have shed new light on ...

The note cards and images document trees and primates observed by Suzanne Ripley during 1966 - 1971. Images are organized by plant and primate, then by binomial. Each binomial includes a series of ...