Collection Description

The DULC Division of Fossil Primates currently houses approximately 24,000 fossil vertebrate specimens resulting from field projects over the past three decades in Egypt, India, Madagascar, and Wyoming. The collection includes material from the Eocene (Egypt, Wyoming), Oligocene (Egypt), Miocene (Egypt, India), Pleistocene (Madagascar), and Holocene (Madagascar). The collection has additional importance because Elwyn Simons has negotiated unique contracts overseas allowing the DULC to permanently acquire half of all collections made outside this country. The collections therefore are some of the most significant in the United States because of the large amount of foreign fossil material permanently housed at the DULC. The presence of these collections in this country allows them to be studied inexpensively by a large number of researchers and students who may not otherwise have been able to access any such specimens without having to travel extensively.

The holdings from the Eocene and Oligocene of the Fayum region of Egypt are by far the largest and most unique portion of the collection. These collections include important remains of a diversity of vertebrates including primates, rodents, hyracoids, elephant shrews, sea cows, elephants, insectivores, creodonts, bats, birds, turtles, fish, and ptolemaiids, an extinct mammalian order unique to the Fayum. Undoubtedly the Center's Egyptian Eocene and Oligocene archaic anthropoid primate collection is the most remarkable collection of fossils related to the early stages of the study of human relatives and possible ancestors currently housed in the United States. The only other collection in the world with an extensive series of similar fossil primates was also collected by Elwyn Simons' expeditions for the Cairo Geological Museum. The Center currently holds more than 1,000 primate specimens from Egypt including many remarkably well preserved crania of early anthropoid primates.

The collection of subfossil vertebrates from the Pleistocene and Holocene of Madagascar includes the largest sample of extinct Malagasy primates outside of Madagascar, numbering approximately 1,935 specimens. It is larger and more diverse than the holdings of the Natural History Museum in London, the Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris, and it dwarfs the small collections in Sweden, Vienna, and the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Because of pioneering research methodologies in cave paleontology, many of the specimens are associated remains of craniodental and postcranial elements. Specimens of taxa unknown to science until the last decade, such as Babakotia, are now to be found in this country, and the world outside Madagascar, only at the DULC. The collection also holds unique growth sequences of some subfossil species (e.g., Megaladapis and Archaeolemur). Other extraordinary fossils include a newly recognized predatory bird and representatives of the subfossil pygmy hippos that once populated Madagascar. The assemblage of "living lemurs" in the fossil collections is critically important to reconstructing the historical biogeography of the island's fauna, and they clearly document and provide insight into the continuing extinction event in Madagascar.

In addition to the large collections from Egypt and Madagascar, there are significant collections of primates and other vertebrates from Wyoming and India. These holdings include Miocene hominoid remains from India and a broad diversity of Eocene mammals from Wyoming including omomyid primates and creodonts.