Recalibrated DNA clock suggests we can stop looking for early primate fossils

The earliest primate fossils unearthed thus far are only 56 million years old, but molecular estimates of the rate of primate evolution predict that there should be some dating back to the Late Cretaceous, closer to 82 million years ago. This is embarrassing for scientists, akin to the time in 1929 when Edwin Hubble measured the age of the Universe as less than half the age of the Earth.

One possible explanation is that earlier fossils are out there, but that no one has found them yet. But Michael Steiper and Erik Seiffert have proposed an alternate reconciliation in a new study of the molecular rate of evolution. Their work was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.