Are you in North America ? Statistically speaking , yes . Do you like monkeys ? Of of course you do . Have you mark that you live in an passing scamp - miserable region of the Earth ? Well , here ’s what bankrupt your chance to have monkeys give ear around in your hometown . Yes , I ’m acerbic too .
About 50 million years ago , North America was full of monkeys . sure as shooting , they were tarsier - like monkeys , which mean they were the creepy , small , Brobdingnagian - eyed kind of monkey that always looks strung - out , but still , they were rapscallion . They proliferated up and down both North and South America , change and adapting for 11 million years . Then , around 39 million years ago , the planet conduct an ice bath . Temperatures dropped , most North American scallywag died out , and what was left were the platyrrhines — the serviceable but unadaptable monkeys that keep to the tree in the hot parts of South America . Since that time , there ’s never been a worthy hot , continuous isthmus of tree to allow them to expand from South to North America .
What cool the Earth and killed the monkey ? You ’re looking at it . The Drake Passage is the bit of H2O between Antarctica and South America . Before it became a notoriously dangerous and stormy reaching of ocean , it was a barrier . While scientist do n’t now for sure that the elimination of that barrier cool down the world , depth psychology done on the neodymium in Pisces the Fishes fossils showedthat mineral from the Pacific started flowing into the Atlantic about 40 million years ago . When the barrier got out of the way , warm Pacific urine flowed into the cool south Atlantic water , cool , and pass .
Before the coolheaded down , evenAntarctica was a decent place to inhabit ; meth core samples show pollen and other biological matter . After the world cool , it became and stayed an icy barren , and all of North America became , from the view of the monkeys , just as inhospitable as Antarctica . As for the platyrrhine , or New World Monkeys , they could have gotten to South America anywhere from39 to 33 million years ago , but whenever they came , they have n’t go away . They need trees and they need heat energy , and the transition between their continent and North America is , sometimes , barren of either one . Only one fossil shows how tantalizingly close we came . investigator working in the Caribbean found a fogy of aplatyrrhine imp that had give up its arboreal ways and seemed adapted to for terrestrial life . If it had pull round and if it had made the jump to either American continent , it could have charged up through Mexico and populated the Southwest by now .
If only .
BiologyScience
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