About 10 million years ago, a family of monkeys left the South American mainland on a cruise to Jamaica and, as is still the case for so many tourists today, swiftly fell for the lazy pace of island life. Over many generations, the primates' legs evolved for slow climbs up tropical trees, their mouths grew a few giant molars at the expense of other, tinier teeth and — apparently unburdened by natural predators — the chilled-out tree dwellers spent their days living more like sloths than monkeys. Now, a new study published Nov. 12 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences offers the first major evidence that the ancestors of Jamaica's X. mcgregori monkeys may have been accidental colonists from South America.
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