Puncture marks on early African anthropoids

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Abstract
Field studies of living primates showed that primate predation is a rare event. This must also have been true for past primate communities. In the Fayum Oligocene of Egypt, specimens of all 4 spp. of Upper Fossil Wood Zone primates show evidence of tooth puncture marks. Of the 4 potential groups of primate predators (snakes, raptors, crocodiles and primitive carnivores or creodonts) only crocodiles and creodonts could have made these puncture marks. When the feeding habits of living crocodiles and mammalian carnivores are compared with the evidence from the Fayum, it appears that the Fayum primates were preyed on and/or scavenged by mammalian carnivore-like animals. The dismemberment of the Fayum primates by Oligocene predators indicates, in part, why the Fayum fossil material is rarely articulated. Bone damage by predators may well set limits on what bone associations can be discovered in the Fayum even before the bones are scattered and buried by depositional processes.