Charles Dawin advocated the concept of 'living fossils' in his book, "The Origin of Species". According to his original idea, living fossils are to be found in isolated, and specialized environments where ordinary or normalized organisms are hardly to live. Recently, this concept has been strongly seconded in a popular book entitled "On Methuselah's Trail" written by P. D. Ward. Among the higher primates, Anthropoidea, owl monkeys, the genus Aotus living in South America, can be solely regarded as living fossils, because their Middle Miocene (14 Ma BP) relative, Aotus dindensis found in La Venta, Colombia is hardly distinguishable morphologically from the living form A. trivirgatus. They have been living in dense tropical rain forests along Amazon River. South America has long been an isolated island continent, but the habitat itself cannot be regarded as 'specialized'. Aotus became a living fossil under isolated but "normalized" environment in constrast to other living fossils as Darwin imagined.
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