DNA Analysis Offers Insights on Origin of Extinct Jamaican Monkey | Smart News

Some 11 million years ago, small arboreal primates closely related to the modern-day titi monkey found themselves stranded on makeshift rafts of vegetation south american rivers to islands of the Caribbean. Those that landed in Jamaica followed by an unusual evolutionary path guided by the unique constraints of living island, eventually transforming into creatures with few teeth; short, rodent-like legacies; squat bodies similar to that of the slow loris; and a relaxed, sloth-like lifestyle.

It's been 900 or so years since these primates-officially known as Xenothrix mcgregori-Last lounged in Jamaica's tropical trees, but thanks to a new DNA analysis published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, we now know more about them than ever before.

X. mcgregori Buccaneers of the United States of America. Additional samples, including skulls, legends and jaws, George Dvorsky writes for Gizmodo, but the singularity of the primate's appearance made its origins and exact lineage difficult to trace.

Now, New ScientistMichael Marshall reports, scientists from New York's American Museum of Natural History, London's Natural History Museum, and the Zoological Society of London X. mcgregori bones to map the animal's mitochondrial (inherited only from maternal lineage) and a portion of their nuclear genome. And, after comparing these samples to the DNA of 15 groups of South American primates, the team has determined that X. mcgregori was actually a type of monkey-small, territorial tree-dwellers that roam the South American forests to this day-rather than a wholly unique phylum.

Ross MacPhee of the AMNH's mammalogy department explains that the Jamaican monkey is likely to change its environmental factors.

"Ancient DNA indicates that the Jamaican monkey is really just a monkey with some unusual morphological features, not a wholly distinct branch of New World monkey," he says in a statement. "Evolution can act in unexpected ways, producing miniature elephants, gigantic birds, and sloth-like primates."

According to New Scientist'S Marshall, islands encourages rapid evolution because they tend to host large predators, enabling animals like X. mcgregori to adopt a slower pace of life. At the same time, there is a need for these resources. ace Gizmodo'S Dvorsky notes, island environments have been shown to elephant miniature creatures, "Hobbit" humans, and enormous birds and rats.

Jamaican primate and titi monkey, Dyani Lewis writes for Cosmos. Most variations are usually limited to size and color, which is typically red, brown, gray or black. The key to the primates' relationship, then, lies in their divergent appearances, but their common point of origin.

By the 1700s, X. mcgregori had largely vanished from the Jamaican tropics. And, MacPhee tells New ScientistThe likely culprit behind this disappearance is the same one in the extinction of most of the Caribbean's native species: humans.

As MacPhee concludes, "What we think can not be done Xenothrix, like hundreds of other species, was a victim of direct or indirect impacts by the first humans who got there. "

Like this article?
SIGN UP for our newsletter