Monkeys raft to South America
A handful of African primates survive a transatlantic crossing and found every monkey in the New World.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 7.9 million years
- Known to
- ± 4 million years
- Era
- Oligocene, Cenozoic
Platyrrhine monkeys appear in South America with African relatives and no local ancestry, requiring the same improbable raft crossing as the rodents — and recent finds of a second, unrelated African primate lineage in Peru indicate it happened at least twice. Branisella from Bolivia, at about 26 million years ago, is the oldest well-dated New World monkey. Everything from marmosets to howler monkeys descends from these arrivals, which is why New World monkeys have prehensile tails and side-facing nostrils and Old World monkeys do not.