Undoubted primates first appear almost synchronously in the fossil records of Asia, Europe, and North America. This temporal pattern has complicated efforts to reconstruct the early dispersal history of primates in relation to global climate change and eustatic fluctuations in sea level. Here, I describe fossils from the Tuscahoma Formation on the Gulf Coastal Plain of Mississippi documenting a...

Recent climate reconstructions are analyzed specifically for insights into those patterns of climate variability in past centuries with greatest impact on the North American region. Regional variability, largely associated with the El Nino/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon, the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), and multidecadal patterns of natural variability, are found to mask the emergen...