Egyptian oligocene primates: A review

Abstract

The study of the early anthropoids or anthropoideans from the Oligocene badlands of the Fayum Province, Egypt, covers the greater part of this century. This review discusses the successive stages of our knowledge of these animals, which have become the oldest well understood kinds of higher primates or anthropoideans. The study of the first finds, made early in the century, is reviewed and the various interpretations of these scanty remains are discussed. All initial discussions were based on only four specimens. Essentially all of the early rankings made by authors who, in many cases, had not seen the actual specimens were incorrect. Nevertheless it was realized that these Fayum primates were somehow the earliest relatives of apes and monkeys then known. Prominent scholars questioned whether one of these,Apidium, was even a primate. At the end of the 1950s two specimens, found at the beginning of the century, were located at the American Museum of Natural History. Their description kindled new interest in the Fayum primates and established that they showed cranial characters of higher primates. Beginning in 1961 a sequence of four periods of development in the study of these important ancient pri-mates began. The first was a series of eight expeditions from Yale Univer-sity conducted from 1961 to 1968. These cooperative projects conducted with the Geological Survey and Mining Authority of Egypt (EGSMA) increased the number of primate specimens from six or eight to over 500. These dis-coveries led to the description of new species as well as reports on the first limb elements and cranial remains. After this phase came a period when the desert Fayum was closed to exploration and publications were concerned mainly with continued description of the new finds. The third major period of research that is outlined here, between 1977 and 1989, came with re-newed field work in Egypt now carried out cooperatively between Duke University and EGSMA. The research on Fayum primates in this period was greatly expanded, as is explained in this paper, because: 1) new tech-niques enabled the recovery of extensive collections of postcranial elements as well as skulls and facial crania, which made possible revisions of both anatomy of the propliopithecids and parapithecids; 2) an international in-terdisciplinary team published extensively on the background context for the primates including studies on environment, dating, and geological set-ting; and 3) prosimians in addition to the basal Anthropoidea were found. Since 1990 research on Fayum primates has been expanded even more to include a larger number of researchers, many trained through field work at the various Fayum localities, and although important Oligocene finds continue to be made, a whole new world of Eocene anthropoidean and prosimian primates has been discovered there. © Wiley-Liss, Inc.