If you were searching for the relatives of primates, where would you look? Chances are, the Canadian High Arctic wouldn’t be your first guess, but we now know that primate relatives made it there at least once! In their January 2023 PLOS ONE article, Kristen Miller, Chris Beard, and Kristen Tietjen describe two new species of Ignacius, a plesiadapiform primatamorph from the late early Eocene of what is now Ellesmere Island.
Notably, this is the northernmost record of a primate relative ever found in the fossil record! But what were these little primatamorphs doing all the way up there? Modern primates are among the most thermophilic mammalian groups known, so the presence of a close relative in the Arctic is quite surprising. Fortunately for Ignacius, it turns out that weather on Ellesmere Island in the Eocene was warm and wet, more like present day Mississippi than Nunavut.
But there’s still one problem: even hot early Eocene, Ellesmere Island was still high in the Arctic Circle, meaning that it would have been perpetually dark for a significant protion of the year. Seemingly to accomodate, these two new Ignacius species show dental adaptations consistent with a heavier reliance on tougher “fallback” foods, likely allowing them to thrive in the polar darkness.
Read the article here: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0280114
Beard Lab 