rdfs:comment
| - In both Spec and our home timestream, primates evolved at the cusp of the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary. Fragmentary evidence from Home-Earth (none has yet been found in Spec) suggests simian precursors in the latest Cretaceous, but these fossils (called Purgatorius) are only tentatively assigned to Primates. These climbers may, therefore, have evolved after the end of the Cretaceous, in which case their presence on Spec is yet another example of parallelism and the primate-like creatures of Spec should be properly called p-Primates. However, since even the exhaustively analyzed primate fossil record of Home Earth remains unclear on the matter, most researchers are content to group both Spec and our own primate species into a single clade.
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abstract
| - In both Spec and our home timestream, primates evolved at the cusp of the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary. Fragmentary evidence from Home-Earth (none has yet been found in Spec) suggests simian precursors in the latest Cretaceous, but these fossils (called Purgatorius) are only tentatively assigned to Primates. These climbers may, therefore, have evolved after the end of the Cretaceous, in which case their presence on Spec is yet another example of parallelism and the primate-like creatures of Spec should be properly called p-Primates. However, since even the exhaustively analyzed primate fossil record of Home Earth remains unclear on the matter, most researchers are content to group both Spec and our own primate species into a single clade. The first good primate fossils on either world turn up in the Paleocene, from strata 50 million years old, and show generalized tree-climbers, creatures with stereoscopic vision, opposable digits on hands and feet, and a slew of other features useful in an arboreal life. In both Spec and our home timeline, these little climbers spread across Asia and North America, and soon began to diversify. Spec's change in primate evolution, the switch that failed to turn on, occurred some time during the Eocene, still early in the Cenozoic. At this point in our home timeline, the first primates had split into two lineages, the adapids (which would later give rise to the lemurs and lorises) and the omomyids (the ancestors of tarsiers, monkeys, and apes). In Spec, no such split occurred; the omomyids never evolved. We can never know exactly why only one primate line emerged from the Eocene. Perhaps the larger, monkey-like niches into which the early omomyids might have expanded were already taken by other animals. The fruit-eating pithecavians had evolved by the late Eocene, and may have prevented the evolution of the proto-monkeys. Whatever the reason, only the adapid-derived primates, the lemurs and lorises, and a few of their stranger brethren live on Spec.
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