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Dr. Chris Gilbert's Research Team Discovers New Fossil Primate Genus and Species in India

A research team headed by Professor Chris Gilbert, of the Anthropology Department, recently discovered "parts of a jawbone of a primate, belonging to a hitherto unknown species, believed to have lived 13 million years ago on the Indian subcontinent," according to an article in The Telegraph, a newspaper based in Calcutta, India; "'The interesting thing about the Ramnagar fossils is that their exact age is still uncertain, but there is some evidence that they might be older than 12.5 million years, perhaps closer to approximately 13.5 million years. If this is true, then the molecular clock calibration point would have to be adjusted, resulting in slightly different estimates for how long different primate lineages have been separated, including chimps and humans,' Gilbert explains. This could probably explain why a small piece of relic found in a testing terrain like Ramnagar can produce far-reaching changes in our collective evolutionary history."

Gilbert is lead author of an article on the team's findings, which will be published in the Journal of Human Evolution; among his co-authors is Hunter MA student Kathleen Rust, who is also a member of the research team. 

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