A 37-million-year-old fossil primate from Egypt, described in this week's issue of Nature, moves a controversial German fossil known as Ida out of the human lineage, Nature News reports.

"Teeth and ankle bones of the new Egyptian specimen show that the 47-million-year-old Ida, formally called Darwinius masillae, is not in the lineage of early apes and monkeys (haplorhines), but instead belongs to ancestors (adapiforms) of today's lemurs and lorises," Nature News said.

Illustration courtesy of: Zina Deretsky, National Science Foundation

The National Science Foundation, which supported the new research, said paleontologists from three American universities "are revealing features of a newly discovered African primate and solving a riddle about humankind's evolutionary past." 

Lead researcher Erik Seiffert of New York's Stony Brook University and his colleagues say their find has the potential to clear up a portion of the human evolutionary tree by resolving the location of a misplaced species, NSF said in a statement.

"The recently described fossil Darwinius, originally recovered from a disused quarry near Messel, Germany in the 1980s, has been widely publicized as an important 'link' in the lineage to higher primates," said Seiffert.

He and his research team recently discovered a lemur-like relative of Darwinius in about 40 miles outside Cairo, Egypt. They named it Afradapis and analyzed its place in primate evolution.

"Our study results indicate that Darwinius and its now extinct relatives, including Afradapis, are not in the evolutionary lineage leading to monkeys, apes, and humans as has been debated," he said. "Instead they are more closely related to the living lemurs and lorises."

Illustration courtesy of Erik Seiffert, Stony Brook University

Seiffert's team, which includes Jonathan M. G. Perry of Midwestern University, Ill; Elwyn L. Simons of Duke University, N.C. and Doug M. Boyer also of Stony Brook, base their findings on analysis of Afradapis fossils collected from an excavation site modestly called BQ-2 near the Fayum Depression in northern Egypt.

Photo courtesy of Erik Seiffert, Stony Brook University

They first discovered a poorly preserved Afradapis fossil, a fragment that showed features of the front teeth and jaw bone that were almost identical to those of later Old World monkeys, NSF said. "But it didn't make sense to the researchers that a member of that primate lineage would have been present in Africa at such an early time period, about 37 million years ago.

"Soon they recovered additional Afradapis fossils and through dental analysis eventually clarified that Afradapis and Darwinius weren't in the line of Old World monkeys, apes and humans, but had concurrently evolved similar features with their distant relative, a type of anthropoid."

"The similar features evolved through the process of convergent evolution," Seiffert explained. "This means that under similar selection pressures, both lineages came to have similar specializations, but these features were not present in their last common ancestor."

Noted shared specializations from dental examinations include fusion of the two halves of the jaw, reduction and loss of the first few premolar teeth, and the presence of front incisors that are each shaped like a spatula, rather than being shaped more like a cone.

"The latter hypothesis hinges on features such as fusion of the two halves of the jaw, reduction and loss of the first few premolar teeth, and the presence of incisors. Researchers say their studies of the jaw and teeth of the adapiform Afradapis shows that adapiforms and the distant relatives of monkeys and apes independently evolved similar features."

Photo courtesy of Erik Seiffert, Stony Brook University

Interestingly, the ancestors of Old World monkeys, apes, and humans developed these features millions of years later, long after Afradapis and Darwinius were extinct, NSF said. "But, reconstructing the most likely family tree of both living and extinct primates, taking into consideration virtually all available anatomical evidence, the paleontologists determined that Darwinius, and its relative Afradapis, are not in the direct evolutionary line with humans."

"Our discoveries certainly contribute to a growing body of evidence that indicates that convergent evolution was a common phenomenon in early primate evolution," Seiffert said.

The finding is reported in the October 20 issue of the journal Nature. NSF supports the research through its social, behavioral and economic sciences directorate's physical anthropology program.

NGS photo of modern dung beetles by Chris Johns

"Thirty million years ago South America was home to what is known to paleontologists as the South America Megafauna, including some truly giant extinct herbivores: bone-covered armadillos the size of a small car, ground sloths 6 meters [20 feet] tall and elephant-size hoofed mammals unlike anything alive today," Palaeontology says in a statement released today.

"Megafauna would have produced megadung."

"And of course, megafauna would have produced megadung!"

The research was done by Graduate Student Victoria Sánchez and Dr Jorge Genise of the Museo Argentino de Ciencias Naturales, Buenos Aires, Argentina.

They report traces made by other creatures within fossil dung balls.

"The beetles certainly had their work cut out for them and although the dung beetles themselves did not fossilize, we know they were fully engaged in business because, amazingly, the results of their activities are preserved as fossil dung balls, some more than 40 million years old, and some as large as tennis balls," Palaeontology says.

NGS illustration of white dung beetle by Hashime Murayama

"Now paleontologists in Argentina studying these dung balls have discovered that they have even more to tell us about the ecology of this lost world of giant mammals, but at a rather different scale."

"Some of these are just the results of chance interactions" Sánchez explains.

"Burrowing bees, for example, dug cells in the ground where the dung balls were buried, and some of these happen to have been dug into the balls.

"But other traces record the behaviour of animals actively stealing the food resources set aside by the dung beetles.

"The shapes and sizes of these fossilized burrows and borings in the dung balls indicate that other beetles, flies and earthworms were the culprits.

"Although none of these animals is preserved in these rocks, the fossil dung balls preserve in amazing detail a whole dung-based ecosystem going on right under the noses of the giant herbivores of 30 million years ago."

NGS photo by Chris Johns

Extinct Dung Beetles "Deserve a Medal"

"The dung beetle has fallen on hard times," the researchers note in Palaeontology. "Once worshipped by ancient Egyptians its status has now slipped to that of unsung and forgotten hero, the butt of scatological jokes. Yet the dung beetle is truly heroic."

"Were it not for the dung beetle the world would be knee-deep in animal droppings."

"It is a well known 'fact' that were it not for the dung beetle the world would be knee-deep in animal droppings, especially those of large herbivores like cows, rhinos and elephants which, because they eat more food, produce more waste," the researchers continue.

"By burying that waste dung beetles not only remove it from the surface, they improve and fertilise the soil and reduce the number of disease-carrying flies that would otherwise infest the dung.

"If the modern dung beetle deserves praise for these global sanitation efforts, then the extinct dung beetles of ancient South America deserve a medal."

The dung beetle research by Sánchez and Genise was funded by CONICET, The Argentinean National Research Council for Science and Technolology.

More from National Geographic News:

Dung Fossils Suggest Dinosaurs Ate Grass

Dino Dung: Paleontology's Next Frontier?

For Dung Beetles, Monkey Business Is Serious Stuff

Dung Beetles Navigate by the Moon, Study Says

Illustration by Mark Witton, University of Portsmouth

Balloon-like air sacs, which extended from the lungs throughout the body, hollowing out many bones, paved the way for the evolution of pterosaurs to take flight, scientists announced today.

"In the Mesozoic Era, 70 million years before birds first took wing, pterosaurs dominated the skies with sparrow to aeroplane-size wingspans," says a news statement by the University of Leicester, United Kingdom. "Scientists already knew, on the basis of fossil evidence from the wings, that these extinct reptiles were able to power their flight through flapping, but had little understanding of how pterosaurs met the high energetic requirements for flight."

The new research published in the journal PLoS ONE by researchers from the University of Leicester (UK), Ohio University (USA) and College of the Holy Cross (USA) explains how balloon-like air sacs, which extended from the lungs throughout the body, hollowing out many of the bones in the pterosaur skeleton, provide evidence for a remarkably efficient breathing system in the ancient beasts.

"As an important bonus, the pneumatized skeletal system and air sacs reduced the density of pterosaurs, allowing the evolution of the largest vertebrates ever to take flight, some reaching 10 meters in wingspan," the news statement said.

"We have identified the breathing system of a pterosaur. It's a surprisingly efficient mechanism with the same essential structure of a modern bird's lung apparatus -- except 70 million years earlier" said study co author Dave Unwin, a palaeobiologist in the Department of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester.

Photo courtesy University of Rochester

A fossil of a tropical, freshwater, Asian turtle suggests that animals migrated from Asia to North America directly across a freshwater sea floating atop the warm, salty Arctic Ocean, scientists announced today in the journal Geology.

The finding (in the photo above) also suggests that a rapid influx of carbon dioxide some 90 million years ago was the likely cause of a super-greenhouse effect that created extraordinary polar heat.

"We're talking about extremely warm, ice-free conditions in the Arctic region, allowing migrations across the pole," says John Tarduno, professor  of geophysics at the University of Rochester, New York, and leader of the expedition that found the fossil. Tarduno's work was funded in part by the National Geographic Society's Committee for Research and Exploration.

"We've known there's been an interchange of animals between Asia and North America in the late Cretaceous period, but this is the first example we have of a fossil in the High Arctic region showing how this migration may have taken place," he says in a news release about the research.

Image courtesy of Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum

An ancient relative of modern ducks and geese that skimmed the swampy wetlands of what is today England had a 16-foot wingspan and a beak full of crocodile-like teeth, scientists said on Friday.

Announced in the journal Palaeontology, the findings were based on a skull that belonged to Dasornis, a bony-toothed bird, or pelagornithid. It was discovered in the London Clay, a marine geological formation that lies under much of  of southeast England.