The world’s oldest known fossil primate skeleton is from an animal that lived about 55 million years ago and was even smaller than today’s smallest primate, the pygmy mouse lemur. The new specimen, named Archicebus achilles, was unearthed from an ancient lake bed in central China and is described by an international team of researchers today in the journal Nature.

In a video, Research Associate Lowell Dingus and Mark A. Norell, chair of the Division of Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History, explain what we know about what the skin of extinct dinosaurs might have looked like.

 Mark A. Norell, chair of the Division of Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History, addresses the question: How long were dinosaurs' lifespans?

It's down to just a final, furry 4 potential nicknames for our hypothetical placental ancestor! Vote for the two finalists now.

Opening tomorrow, the special exhibition Whales: Giants of the Deep is co-curated by John J. Flynn, Frick Curator of Fossil Mammals, Division of Paleontology, and Dean of the Richard Gilder Graduate School. We recently spoke with Dr. Flynn about the exhibition’s many highlights, his fieldwork in South America, and his sightings of whales in the wild.