Hunter College Doctoral Lecturer in Anthropology Ingrid Lundeen has won a prize from the Journal of Human Evolution for a paper on primate fossils.
Lundeen won the 2023 First Prize award for her work “Euarchontans from Fantasia, an upland middle Eocene locality at the western margin of the Bighorn Basin.” The study by Lundeen and her co-author Christopher Kirk described and compared 50 new euarchontan fossils from the 48-million-year-old “Fantasia” site, located on the western margin of the Bighorn Basin in Wyoming.
Euarchontans, the group that includes modern primates, colugos, and tree shrews, have a rich evolutionary history and were abundant in the tropical forests found in much of North America from about 56 to 40 million years ago. The research paper highlights the importance of taking into account topographic and paleoenvironmental conditions to understand the evolution of euarchontans from the Bighorn Basin and opens research avenues to explore the effects of altitudinal variation on body size in extinct and living primates.
