Miniscule fossil discovery reveals fresh clues into the evolution of the earliest-known relative of all primates

Purgatorius had previously only been found in the upper regions of North America, this discovery, 500 miles south, suggests they diversified soon after the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous

Taylor & Francis Group

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Purgatorius upper molar from Corral Bluffs Denver Basin CO 

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Credit: Dr Stephen Chester

New, miniscule fossils of the earliest-known relative of all primates, including humans, Purgatorius, have been unearthed in a more southern region of North America than ever before – and the breakthrough is providing paleontologists fresh clues about evolution.

The origin and early biogeographic history of primates is a fascinating, albeit controversial topic. The oldest archaic primate, Purgatorius, is a small, shrew-sized mammal that first appears in North America immediately after the extinction of the dinosaurs around 65.9 million years ago.

While fossil bearing rock of the right age exists throughout North America, to-date this mammal had previously only been found in present day Montana and southwestern Canada.
The next set of archaic primates include a diversity of relatives in southwestern USA, but these date to some two million years later – which has left somewhat of a puzzle… until now.

As findings, published today in the peer-reviewed Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, report the southernmost discovery of Purgatorius fossils ever unearthed – uncovered in Colorado’s Denver Basin, at the Corral Bluffs study area.

“The discovery helps fill the gap in understanding the geography and evolution of our earliest primate relatives,” explains lead author Dr. Stephen Chester, associate professor at Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY), who led the study alongside colleagues from the Denver Museum of Nature & Science (DMNS).

“The presence of these fossils in Colorado suggests that archaic primates originated in the north and then spread southward, diversifying soon after the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous Period,” adds Dr. Chester.

“Ankle bones of Purgatorius exhibit features that indicate it lived in trees, so we initially thought its absence south of Montana could be related to the sweeping devastation of forests from the asteroid impact 66 million years ago.

“However, our paleobotanical colleagues suggested the recovery of plants in North America was fast leading us to believe that Purgatorius should also be in more southern regions and perhaps we simply hadn’t looked hard enough.”

To enable this deeper dive, Dr. Chester and colleagues from DMNS, deployed a careful, but extensive screen-washing technique. It was used, thanks, in part, to the support of a nearly $3 million collaborative grant from the National Science Foundation, which has funded a wider project – led by Dr Tyler Lyson at DMNS – to understand how life on Earth recovered following the mass extinction, best known for the demise of the dinosaurs.

The extensive screen-washing of sediments and picking was carried out by students and volunteers. It resulted in countless fossils of fish, crocodilians, turtles, and… eventually, a few tiny Purgatorius teeth that would fit on the tip of a baby’s finger.

What is particularly “exciting”  about these teeth, explains Dr. Jordan Crowell, a postdoctoral fellow at the DMNS who also played a key role in the study, is that they could in fact belong to an earlier species of Purgatorius.

“The specimens have a unique combination of features compared to known species of Purgatorius, but we are awaiting the recovery of additional material to assess whether these fossils represent a new species,” he adds.

These tiny teeth also demonstrate that the previously presumed absence of early primate relatives in more southern states of the Western Interior of North America was at least partly due to a sampling bias. Paleontologists have been finding fossils from this region and time interval using traditional surface collecting techniques for nearly 150 years, which mostly results in the collection of large fossils that are apparent to the naked eye.

“Thanks to our long-term partnership with the City of Colorado Springs who own the land where the fossils were collected, as well as countless hours of work by our volunteers and interns picking through the dirt for the precious vertebrate fossils, we are building some incredible datasets that provide insights on how life including our earliest primitive primate ancestors, rebounded after the single worst day for life on Earth,” adds co-author Dr Lyson.

“Our results demonstrate that small fossils can easily be missed,” concludes Dr. Chester. “With more intensive searching, especially using screen-washing techniques, we will undoubtedly discover many more important specimens.”

The paper also includes co-author Dr. David Krause, Senior Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology at the DMNS.

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Journal

Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology

DOI

10.1080/02724634.2026.2614024 

Method of Research

Observational study

Subject of Research

Animal tissue samples

Article Title

Southernmost occurrence of Purgatorius sheds light on the biogeographic history and diversification of the earliest primate relatives

Article Publication Date

3-Mar-2026

Purgatorius original by Andrey Atuchin

Brooklyn College Undergraduate Research Assistants

Credit

Stephen Cheste

 

DMNS interns and volunteers

Credit

Dr Tyler Lyson

“Peculiar” ancient ancestor of the crocodile started life on four legs in adolescence before it began walking on two

Newly discovered Late Triassic reptile was among creatures that had physical features mimicking the late-evolving dinosaurs it lived beside

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Artist's reconstruction of Sonselasuchus cedrus in its environment in what is now Petrified Forest National Park, 215 million years ago.

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Credit: Artwork by Gabriel Ugueto

A “peculiar” ancient relative of the crocodile which experts believe began life on four legs before, in adulthood, it learnt how to walk on just two has been revealed in a new study.

Named Sonselasuchus cedrus, this archaic reptile was part of the shuvosaurid group, most of which had an appearance mimicking that of the ornithomimid dinosaurs that it shared the landscape with during Late Triassic time (approximately 225-201 million years ago).

In peer-reviewed findings, published today in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, experts from University of Washington Department of Biology and Burke Museum reveal that unusual proportions of some of the fossils led them to believe that this poodle-sized creature had to learn how to walk on two feet.

“By analyzing the proportions of the limb skeletons of different animals, they determined its bipedal stance (standing on two feet) may have been the result of a differential growth pattern,” explains lead author Elliott Armour Smith.

“We think that Sonselasuchus had more proportional forelimbs and hindlimbs as young, and their hindlimb grew longer and more robust through adulthood.

“Essentially, we think these creatures started out their lives on four legs… they then started walking on two legs as they grew up.

“This is particularly peculiar.”

Armour Smith, a graduate student, carried out the study alongside Burke Museum colleague Professor Christian Sidor.

Professor Sidor was among the dig team that unearthed the 950 Sonselasuchus fossils, in 2014, from Arizona’s Petrified Forest National Park – an extraordinary fossil site which in 10 years of excavation and preparation has revealed more than 3,000 fossil bones.

Sonselasuchus’ fossils also reveal many clues about its appearance and 25-inch tall size. It had a toothless beak, a large eye socket, hollow bones, the experts believe.

“Although similar to the ornithomimid dinosaurs these features would have evolved separately,” explains Armour Smith, “and this similarity was probably due to the fact that croc-line and bird-line archosaurs evolved in the same ecosystems and converged upon similar ecological roles.

“Also, despite the fact that features like bipedalism, a toothless beak, hollow bones and a large orbit are characteristic of ornithomimid theropod dinosaurs, shuvosaurids like Sonselasuchus show that these features evolved on the croc-line as well.”

Sonselasuchus would have lived in the forest, and its name cedrus represents the cedar tree, an evergreen conifer similar to those of Late Triassic forests.

The Sonselasuchus part of the name (pronounced “sawn-SAY-la-SOOK-us”) is in recognition of the geologic unit (the Sonsela Member of the Upper Triassic Chinle Formation) from which the animal originates.

This bedrock has presented many finds to-date.

For Professor Sidor, this project is a culmination of over a decade of fieldwork in collaboration with the National Park Service.

“Since starting fieldwork at Petrified Forest in 2014, we have collected over 3,000 fossils from the Sonselasuchus bonebed, and it doesn’t seem to show any signs of petering out,” Professor Sidor states.

“In addition to Sonselasuchus, the bonebed has yielded fossils of fish, amphibians, as well as dinosaurs and other reptiles. Over 30 University of Washington students and volunteers have been involved over the years. It’s exciting to see that the site continues to produce new and interesting fossils.”

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Journal

Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology

DOI

10.1080/02724634.2025.2604859 

Article Title

Osteology and relationships of a new shuvosaurid (Pseudosuchia, Poposauroidea) from the Upper Triassic Chinle Formation of Petrified Forest National Park, Arizona, U.S.A.

Article Publication Date

9-Mar-2026

AMERIKAN FEMICIDE

Renee Good, Viola Liuzzo and the Fragile Ego

of Masculinism

Phil Wilson

 January 19, 2026

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Viola Liuzzo.

There are a few new things in the US – just recycled atrocities that the media fails to recognize as sequels. In the US flash flood of bad dreams, the latest event in the drive-by-whizz of meaningless horror – the cold-blooded public execution of Renee Good – has come and gone. Good now becomes – at the moment the bullets strike – a sort of wayward example of uncertainty. Why Renee Good? At a casual glance she is none of the things that the US hates murderously – not an immigrant or a communist, not even an atheist. We learn that she has a wife and that she had been previously married twice to male partners. There is no reason to assume that the murderer, Jonathan Ross, knew any of this – and one should not speculate that he acted out of homophobic rage. Have we seen Renee Good before in the shadow play of the US news cycle? Renee Good projects a disturbing ordinariness – an old dog in the back with a grey muzzle, and a child seat next to the dog. Our bleary eyes alight for a moment on a seemingly unremarkable white woman caught in the act of briefly departing from domestic routine. Like all random murder victims, she dies in the wrong place at the wrong time.

We have a history of home-based enemies – Jews, Muslims, atheists, Unitarians, communists, Quakers, socialists – people that the FBI historically side-eyes with a measure of latent disgust, but only sporadically assaults. Fascism pulls up the mask, pulls down the pants, and reveals a fully erect gun that finally has the full blessing of the highest authorities. Renee Good is not the first upstanding White woman to be offered up at the altar of violent sacrifice – even in my own youth, we had Allison Krause (not Allison Krauss, the blue-grass fiddle savant) and Sandra Scheuer. Kent State National Guardsmen panicked and sprayed gunfire. This massacre fell well within the US tradition of mass shootings – the periodic ritual involving guns, crowds, vengeance, and paranoia. Nixon, sociopath, lia,r and war criminal that he was, understood that the optics of repression required that he tread carefully around the issue of murdering upstanding White US citizens. He called a press conference after the shooting and cleverly, in a soft, measured voice, bullshitted the public about his belief that “the protesters” wanted peace just like he did. We are really all on the same side he said. Yeah, this was the sort of flagrant dishonesty that inspired Trump. Trump figured out that racists want their bile in its most transparent form. But America’s homicidal zeal generally has tiptoed around the unique privilege of those living comfortably in the homeland. If Allison Krause and Sandra Scheuer were mere victims of paranoia and chance – catching bullets that momentarily sprayed hatred while seeking random targets – we have an obscure history of political harm toward wayward White women that has been overlooked.

Predictably, Black women are killed by police in greater numbers than White women, but researchers have compellingly argued that class, even more than race, accounts for the demographic details of police killings. One study concluded that poor White people are statistically more likely to be killed by police than middle and upper-middle-class Black people. The murder of Renee Good, however, does not fit into the typical categories of police violence that help us to place the killing of, say, Breonna Taylor into a broader context. Middle and upper-middle-class White women are among the least likely demographics to die by police violence.

However, Good was not killed by police, but by paramilitary forces (even if given official status in the current fascist system). Unlike Breonna Taylor, who was killed in a random hail of bullets by hair trigger police who had forcefully entered Taylor’s apartment in a botched effort to arrest a suspect who was not present, Good seems likely to have been targeted, at least in part, for her gender. We can’t get into the head of the murderer, Jonathan Ross, but it might not be outlandish to guess that Good’s white skin triggered the homicidal response in some way as well. If dark skinned and poor people often risk police ire as a matter of predictable institutional racism, White, educated, middleclass women have a very rare and specific way of falling afoul of violent authorities.

Good’s murder fits into a category so vanishingly small, that I can think of only one single historical incident that shares similar context – the 1965 KKK murder of civil rights volunteer, Viola Liuzzo. It may seem startling to view ICE as the linear offspring of the KKK, but the tie between Klan violence and police killings (as recognized in the famous Rage Against the Machine line, “some of those that work forces are the same that burn crosses”) ought to make us aware that right wing paramilitary violence has always been an adjunct to official power structures.

Liuzzo entered America’s most terrifying fantasy when a car with four Klansmen (one being an FBI informer) pulled alongside her vehicle on an Alabama road between Selma and Montgomery. She had Michigan license plates and a 19-year-old Black male passenger next to her. She had bravely gone to Alabama to help organize Black voters, and to ferry disenfranchised people to places of registration – in and of itself, a capital offense in Jim Crow states. Thus, the psychological triggers, within the KKK hypervigilant psyche, made her fate inevitable. Her killers likely imagined her as the very symbol of “miscegenation.” A White woman with a younger Black man on a rural stretch of road might have stirred the most violent fear in the White, masculinist heart. A klansman shot her in the head. Like with Renee Good, her car veered and crashed. Her passenger, Leroy Moton, survived by pretending to be dead. In the hierarchy of masculinist rage, the murderous impulse reserves a place for White women who stray from their cultural niche.

But death was not enough retribution – FBI head, J Edgar Hoover, launched a smear campaign against Liuzzo, accusing her of being an adulterer and a heroin addict. The Klan publicly exulted in her murder, posting pictures of her dead body, and “bragging about the murder.” The masculinist, racist mindset mobilized against Viola Liuzzo’s legacy – in death, she might have become the first White, female martyr in the struggle for racial equality. J Edgar Hoover and his allies in the Klan made every effort to erase Viola Liuzzo from historical consciousness. They succeeded in spectacular fashion. We recall John Brown, Medgar Evans, Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney and Rev. James Reeb with due reverence, but Viola Liuzzo remains as an obscure footnote.

An undergraduate research paper by Alyssa Ness observed:

“When comparing Liuzzo’s murder to other murders during the civil rights movement, it is evident that she not only received less recognition for her heroic dedication in the movement than others but was also heavily scrutinized by the government and the public through the media for defying traditional white gender roles for women of her time. Louis B. Nichols was hired by the FBI in order to manage the bureau’s interactions with news and media. Nichol’s main role in the bureau was to prevent the bureau from gaining negative attention through media and entertainment by promoting its preferred image, and any media outlet that opposed the FBI would be attacked by supporting media outlets. The FBI and press distorted the reason Liuzzo had participated in the march and what the march was about in order to gain public support. Along with Hoover and the press, traditional middle class white women tormented the legacy of Liuzzo with accusations of her being mentally ill because she was not solely fulfilled by the role of a homemaker and mother. The public and media also heavily criticized Jim Liuzzo due to his inability to keep his wife under control. The New York Times published an article calling out Liuzzo for failing to deter his wife from her fate.”

Carolyn Bryant acted out the prescribed role for southern women in the Jim Crow era. Bryant, you may recall, accused Emmet Till of making advances on her as she clerked in her family-owned grocery store in Drew, Mississippi. Till, a 14-year-old boy from Chicago, was abducted, tortured, and murdered by Bryant’s husband and another KKK-affiliated accomplice 11 years prior to Liuzzo’s murder. Perhaps Liuzzo’s killing sheds light on the psychology of Carolyn Bryant. Women like Bryant knew all too well that vigilant male paranoia circumscribed White female sexuality. Miscegenation was a crime on the books in Jim Crow states, and, as Viola Liuzzo’s fate showed, it took little evidence to provoke the paramilitary institutions that enforced antiquated laws with brutal informality.

The lynching of Emmet Till and the murder of Viola Liuzzo are linked directly to current expressions of hyper-masculine self-doubt. Renee Good, like Liuzzo, violated the unwritten rules of racial propriety that racist White men demand. Female moral fortitude in a racist society will often be conflated with sexual abandonment. In a right-wing ecosystem featuring men who obsessively ruminate about rejection (consider the widespread “Incel” movement), acts of White female resistance to racist violence serve as symbols of sexual rejection.

As White women commit themselves to the battle against ICE, the right-wing pundit sphere will indulge in ever more flamboyant methods to label activism as sexual deviance. My point is well illustrated by the lunatic writer, Naomi Wolf, in this post on X:

“Okay, I’ll just say it. I’ve seen enough videos of the faces of liberal white women in conflict with @ICE, to know what is up. Liberal men at this point (sorry) are disproportionately estrogenized, physically passive, submissive due to woke gender hectoring, or porn-addicted. White liberal women are disproportionately sexually frustrated. Policing others as in the pandemic was an outlet for them, but it was not nearly enough. The smiles you see on their faces now say it all: white women long for all out combat with ICE – who tend to be strong, physically confident, masculine men – because the conflict is a form of physical release for them. They long for actual kinetic battle and it will get even uglier.”

The right-wing politicians and pundits now engage in a desperate struggle to tarnish the memory of Renee Good and to prevent her from becoming a martyr. They will alternately insist that she engaged in domestic terrorism or that she channeled her sexual frustrations into a vicarious rendezvous with the “real men” who work for ICE. When Ross murdered Good, he sneered, “fucking bitch,” as her dead body lay in the moving car. How many men have murdered women who rejected them? Now this inchoate rage against rejection becomes a subconscious theme affixed to a new wave of political violence. While Viola Liuzzo stands out as a historical anomaly, violence toward middle-class White women who confront the brutal treatment of dark-skinned targets of the fascist state will almost certainly occur again.

I don’t believe that Renee Good’s legacy will be destroyed as authorities sullied the memory of Viola Liuzzo. We have the video for Good as we did not for Liuzzo. But isn’t it long overdue that Viola Liuzzo be recognized as one of the great heroes of the civil rights era? After all, Liuzzo’s heroism helps us to understand the tragedy of Renee Good.

Phil Wilson is a retired mental health worker who has written for Common Dreams, CounterPunch, Resilience, Current Affairs, The Future Fire and The Hampshire Gazette. Phil’s writings are posted regularly at Nobody’s Voice.

UK

Woke-Bashing of the Week: From Christmas

to cardigans – the latest ‘anti-men’ panic

Gabrielle Pickard-Whitehead 

18 January, 2026
Right-Wing Watch


Quite what constitutes “the very worst left-wing feminist” remains unclear, beyond, perhaps, a woman who doesn’t particularly enjoy being corrected by men.

With Christmas out of the way and the annual ritual of declaring everything “cancelled” complete, the anti-woke brigade has its sights on the next cultural event – Valentine’s Day.

This time, the outrage is directed at retailer Target, over the release of two colourful sweaters released ahead of February 14. According to the Daily Mail, one is pink and emblazoned with “Dump Him” in bold red lettering, and the other is light blue, with “Emotionally Unavailable” written in black.

Despite what the paper describes as “seemingly harmless messaging,” the Mail reports how the designs were swiftly seized upon by social media users, who accused Target of promoting “anti-men” sentiment. The article quotes a so-called men’s rights activist who posted a photo of the display on X:

“I saw this sweater promoted at Target today. Could you imagine if, in the month leading up to Valentine’s Day, Target was spotlighting a “Dump Her” sweater in the men’s section?” they said.

Others followed suit. “More women hating men propaganda. Gee, shocker,” wrote one user.

“Target is woke,” declared another. “Anti-male garbage. I stopped shopping at Target a long time ago,” snarked a third.

To give the impression of a pattern, the Mail reminded readers of Target’s previous brush with controversy over its Pride collection, specifically, its failure to remove placeholder ‘lorem ipsum’ text from some product tags, as though a design oversight and a pair of tongue-in-cheek sweaters belong to the same moral crisis.

This fixation with an alleged ‘anti-men’ movement has become a recurring theme in the right-wing press. Last month, Telegraph columnist Celia Walden asked: “Are you a woman who hates men? Then the Greens are the perfect party for you.”

Her column cited a leaked 53-page Green Party report which, she claimed, showed party leaders considering an expanded definition of misogyny. Among the supposed horrors was a proposal to include “men who correct women” within that definition. Walden warned that such a move would appeal only to “the very worst left-wing feminist”.

Quite what constitutes “the very worst left-wing feminist” remains unclear, beyond, perhaps, a woman who doesn’t particularly enjoy being corrected by men.