Dr. Chris Beard This is Me

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1. 1. www.science-spirit.org

   www.science-spirit.org/archive - [Cached]

   Published on: 8/16/2008   Last Visited: 8/16/2008

   Chris Beard of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh discovered Eosimias."The whole lineage that became monkeys, apes and humans is a very ancient one" he said.Beard expects palaeontologists will find even more primitive anthropoid fossils in Southeast Asia in the future.

2. 2. www.pbk.org

   www.pbk.org/AM/Template.cfm?Se - [Cached]

   Published on: 5/18/2008   Last Visited: 5/18/2008

   The award recipients are Marjorie Garber of Harvard University, Isabel Hull of Cornell University, and Chris Beard from the Carnegie Museum of Natural History.
   ...
   Chris Beard received the Phi Beta Kappa Book Award in Science for "The Hunt for the Dawn Monkey: Unearthing the Origins of Monkeys, Apes, and Humans" (University of California Press, 2004).
   
   Beard is Curator and Head of the Section of Vertebrate Paleontology at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History and winner of a MacArthur "genius" grant.

3. 3. www.ntskeptics.org

   www.ntskeptics.org/news/news20 - [Cached]

   Published on: 3/15/2008   Last Visited: 7/28/2008

   Christopher Beard, a paleontologist at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, recently discovered fossils of the 55-million-year-old creature on the Gulf Coastal Plain of Mississippi.
   
   Named Teilhardina magnoliana, the animal is related to similarly aged fossils from China, Europe, and Wyoming's Big Horn Basin.
   
   "They are very, very primitive relatives of living primates called tarsiers, which live today in Southeast Asia," Beard said.
   
   But the layer of rock in which the new fossils were found raises the controversial possibility that primates appeared in North America before their close relatives showed up in Europe, as previous studies had suggested, Beard added.
   ...
   The discovery suggests that Teilhardina primates migrated to North America across the Bering land bridge from Asia, Beard said.Then the creatures proceeded to Europe across an Atlantic land bridge that emerged thousands of years later.
   
   Previous research had suggested the primates reached the Americas via a westward route instead, from Asia through Europe.But that path was submerged at the time the primates show up in ancient Mississippi, Beard said.
   
   At that time, the world was undergoing an ancient global warming event known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, or PETM.Many scientists believe the PETM is analogous to what the world is experiencing today due to human-caused increases in greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide.
   
   Unlike today, however, there were no polar ice caps.In fact, sea levels were falling as Earth's shifting landmasses opened up huge ocean basins. (Related: "Volcanic Activity Triggered Deadly Prehistoric Warming" [April 26, 2007].)
   
   T. magnoliana dates to a time before sea levels had fallen enough for primates to cross over to North America from Europe, Beard said.
   
   "We know the sea level was high when our fossil primates lived in Mississippi, because the actual bed that yielded our fossils is a marine bed," he noted.
   
   Most of the fossils at the site were shark teeth and similar objects.The primate's skeleton, he said, likely washed into the shallow estuary from the coastline.
   
   A second fossil bed in a higher layer was laid down by a river or stream, not an ocean, indicating that sea level continued to fall after the primate fossils were deposited, Beard added.
   
   The same sea-level imprints are found in the rock section where Teilhardina was found in Europe.
   ...
   Beard acknowledges that his study lacks an appropriate carbon isotope signature.
   ...
   But though Beard has been unable to find the carbon isotope record at his site in Mississippi, he said he has found an aquatic microorganism that is associated with the record.That, combined with the other geologic evidence, makes him confident in his result.
   
   Tropical Climate
   
   T. magnoliana is best suited to live in hot, muggy climates, Beard added.
   
   So scientists can infer that even the northern reaches of North America were forested, warm, and wet when these creatures migrated across the Bering land bridge, Beard said.