National Geographic News, Reporting Your World Daily

Monday, November 23, 2009

Photo: Nut-Size Ancient Skull Explains Our Brains' Bigness?


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Based on scans of a 1.5-inch-long (4-centimeter-long) skull (foreground) of a 54-million-year-old primate, a 3-D model (background) of the animal's brain suggests that it relied heavily on its sense of smell and had poor eyesight, a June 2009 study says.

The need for better vision—to enable safe leaping from tree to tree—may have resulted in later primates evolving bigger brains, the researchers suggest.

Photograph by Eric Zamora/University of Florida