hey everyone my name is Sophie Barnett
and welcome back to another episode of
lemur fever today we're gonna be talking
about the history of lemurs with our
very first video question so let's get
started
thanks for that amazing questions
well
I've interviewed up in Matthew Borts to
help answer this question.
so I am the
curator of division of fossil primates
of the Duke lemur center what we do here
at the division of fossil primates is
not only curate a collection
we've over
35,000 specimens here from all over the
world because primates are all over the world
we
also expand that collection as a part of
this summer was going out and actually
looking for more fossils to add to that
to start working on having 36000 specimens
and so that meant that research on
primate s because us all over the world
kinds of took me all over the world
so I went to Wyoming and
Utah where actually the western part of
the United States tells us a lot about
early
there used to be North American primates and
actually the oldest relatives of lemurs
but I also got to be part of the field
project in peru
where you're looking for
the fossils of South
American primates
and I went to Madagascar to go and
basically, we didn't do a lot of field
work but we did a lot of discussion to
try to get projects going and we can
collaborate with people at the
University of antananarivo
on newprojects looking for puzzles in
Madagascar
lures around when
dinosaurs are around that's a really
fascinating question and one that is
actually being explored very actively
right now
by a lot of researchers based
on current genetic
evidence it seems
like lemurs and their relatives would
have popped up like right after the
extinction of dinosaurs
and so it's
unlikely that they would have been
living
next to dinosaurs but the fossil
evidence is really what we have
to tell
us if it's true or not and we haven't
explored everywhere in the world and
there are still many fossils being
spread we do know that lemurs are like
present and had fully formed as a true
primates by the time we get to what's
called the DNA and you see it is a time
period about ten million years after the
extinction
that's when we start to get a lot of
modern mammal groups we recognize them
like solidly in the fossil record the
dinosaurs lived during the Mesozoic era
started 251 million years ago and
the
direct relatives aluminum to come into
existence during the early
No
but
special thank you Miss America for that
brilliant question another special
thanks to dr. Matthew ports for allowing
me to interview you for today's episode
bolli Murphy Berg deals on Instagram and
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you'll see a video footage of you
you
