Middle Eocene (Lower Lutetian)

Robiac, Languedoc-Roussillon Region, France

6mm tooth (a lower third molar).

Mammal, Primate.

Adapis is a genus of the Family Adapidae, a group of Mid-Late Eocene primates known from Europe.  It looked more like a lemur than a monkey but the Adapidae was unlikely to have been ancestral to modern lemurs. A study of its postcranial skeleton reveals that it was less like a lemur in that it wasn’t really built for high-performance scampering and leaping – more of a slow climber like a modern loris.

What’s not generally known is that primates were common in North America and western Europe in the Early Eocene. Tropical forests once covered much of land area in Europe and the Rocky Mountain region from New Mexico north all the way to the Arctic Ocean. A worldwide cooling trend starting in the Middle Eocene led to the replacement of the jungle to more open woodlands and primates became less diverse and less common. They died out completely in Europe about ten million years later.