THE eating habits of one of our primate ancestors have been revealed by a startling new fossil.
The fossil is the first to preserve the stomach contents of an extinct primate, and shows that the lemur-like Godinotia neglecta, which lived around 49 million years ago, munched on a diet of fruit and leaves.
Jens Franzen and Volker Wilde at the Senckenberg Research Institute and Nature Museum analysed the superbly preserved fossil, which came from a shale deposit at Messel near Darmstadt in Germany (Journal of Human Evolution, vol 44, p 373). They were surprised not to find any insects in…
