“Unveiling an Ancient Mystery: How Monkeys Became the First Adventurers to Cross the Atlantic Over 30 Million Years Ago!”
Perhaps most astonishing was the Ucayalipithecus‘s form of travel.
The “rafts” were pieces of earth that broke off from the coastline in harsh weather conditions. The resourceful little primates then boarded these small, floating islands and headed toward the New World — millions of years before that moniker came to be.
Erik SeiffertResearchers in Peru, near the border of Brazil, drying sediment in the sun on basic screens.
Researchers generally agree that there are only two other species of “immigrant” mammals that survived an Atlantic crossing, though their method of travel is still heavily debated.
New World Monkeys, or platyrrhine primates — five families of flat-nosed monkeys found in South America and Central America today — were the first. The other was a kind of rodent, dubbed caviomorphs, which are ancestors of animals such as the capybara.
As for these now-extinct primates, they made their trek during the Late Eocene, when the span between African and South American continents measured between 930 to 1,300 miles. Though that’s still quite the commute, it’s a far cry from today’s distance of 1,770 miles.
“I think everyone kind of shakes their heads at primates rafting long or even moderate distances,” said Miller.
Though it’s difficult for some to fathom, animals like lemurs and tenrecs took similar natural rafts from Africa’s mainland to Madagascar. Of course, that’s only around 260 miles — but the theory that animals have used pieces of vegetation to island- or continent-hop is very much a fact.
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