News Section | Evolution
World’s ‘smallest true nails known on record’ discovered
The fossil of world’s oldest known fingernails has been found. The fossils were collected over the last seven years in northwestern Wyoming”s Bighorn Basin.
The prehistoric fingernails date to about 55.8 million years ago and belonged to a primate, now extinct, named Teilhardina brandti. This little lemur-like mammal measured just 6 inches long and lived in trees.
“While we are not sure about the original function of nails in primates, it seems clear that they evolved within the context of living in the trees, possibly associated with specialized grasping behaviours for moving in small diameter branches and manipulation of small food items (fruit, seeds, etc.),” co-author Jonathan Bloch told Discovery News.
“They are not exactly shaped like our nails,” said Bloch, who is an associate curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Florida Museum of Natural History on the University of Florida campus.
“They are flat like ours, but longer and more claw-like than ours. This likely reflects the derivation of nails from an ancestor with claws (something like a tree shrew). It is our hypothesis that we can trace the origin of our own nails back to at least this point,” added Bloch.
He and his colleagues made the discovery after studying more than 25 new specimens of T. brandti.
“They are the smallest true nails known on record, whether living or fossil,” lead author Ken Rose, a professor in the Center for Functional Anatomy and Evolution at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, said in a UF press release.
“That certainly doesn’t suggest nails developed with larger bodies,” added Rose.
The study has been described in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.
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