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Sifting tons of sediment reveals tiny revelation: Earliest ancestor of primates ranged widely in North America
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Almost 66 million years ago, an animal that looked like a rat, or maybe a squirrel, died in Corral Bluffs, Colorado. Its name was Purgatorius. It was either our earliest ancestor or a relative of it, and its discovery 800 miles south of its previously known stamping ground in Cretaceous Canada and Montana means proto-monkeys ranged both farther and earlier than we had thought.
