First North American primate trekked from Siberia

By Will Dunham

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - He was the Albert Einstein of his time -- aside from the fact that this long-extinct critter weighed about an ounce (28 grams), measured three inches long and munched on bugs and berries.

A U.S. scientist has unearthed the remains of the earliest-known primate to live in North America. In doing so, he figured out the path these ancient representatives of the mammalian group that includes lemurs, monkeys, apes and people must have taken to reach this part of the world.

Based on a group of teeth from a teeny primate unearthed in Mississippi dating to 55.8 million years ago, paleontologist Christopher Beard of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh said the species likely scampered over a now-vanished land bridge connecting Siberia to Alaska.

The tiny immigrant was called Teilhardina magnoliana, Beard said in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"For his time, he would have been about the smartest animal around. But that doesn't mean he was thinking deep thoughts," Beard said in a telephone interview.

"Primates have nails on their digits instead of claws. Primates have eyes that face forward and give us stereoscopic vision, instead of having eyes on the side of our heads like a dog or a horse. Primates almost always have relatively larger brains than other mammals," Beard said.

Teilhardina would have fit snugly into the palm of Einstein's hands, but its big thoughts were perhaps more practical than theoretical physics.

"WHERE ARE THE GIRLS?"