The specimens found so far are so small — barely three feet tall — that they have been nicknamed hobbits.
Oreopithecus is best known from complete but crushed specimens found in coal deposits in Europe.
Then, at layers corresponding to the meteorite impact, flowering plants disappear and ferns make up about 90percentt of specimens found.
It is less than 100,000 years older than related specimens found in the Big Horn Basin of Wyoming and in Belgium and France.
Some skeptics even argue that the specimens found so far could be modern humans stricken with disease, though that hypothesis has its own serious problems.
In the new research, the scientists worked with Zhonghe Zhou of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing, conducting similar bone examinations on several specimens found recently in China of feathered dinosaur species.
Of two specimens found in the quarry, one – CM 84 – was better preserved, with a right femur, a near-complete pelvis and an apparently unbroken series of 41 hefty vertebrae.
Perhaps because we no longer get quite the same shock from specimens found in nature, we have become adept at conjuring up weird specimens of our possible futures and calling them real.
Many early reports of its presence in UK waters were dead specimens found on beaches late in the year, indicating that the triggerfish had not retreated south early enough and been killed by the cold.
Centuries before the Christian Era, Babylonians drew maps on clay tablets, of which the oldest specimens found so far have been dated about 2300 bce.
He was determined to seek out not captive rhinos housed at zoos or docile specimens found in tourist-laden national parks, but genuine wild rhinos.
