Tarsiidae
Tarsiers are haplorhine primates of the family Tarsiidae, which is the lone extant family within the infraorder Tarsiiformes. Although the group was prehistorically more globally widespread, all of the existing species are native to Maritime Southeast Asia, predominantly in Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines.

Charles J. Sharp · CC BY-SA 4.0 · via Wikipedia/Commons. May be a photograph of a specimen, or an artist’s reconstruction — an interpretation of a skeleton, since colour and soft tissue are almost never preserved.
On record
Recorded, not inferred- Sits inside
- TarsiiformesPBDB
- Diet
- insectivore, carnivorePBDB
- Life habit
- arborealPBDB
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Osteichthyes
- Environment
- terrestrialPBDB, for Eutheria
Time the record covers
At least 23 million years on record.
The record covers at least 37.71 Mya to 13.82 Mya. No occurrence read is dated outside 56 Mya to 5.333 Mya.
8 occurrences of Tarsiidae on record, most of them in the Miocene. The Paleobiology Database records this as a living group, and the chart stops with its fossils rather than at the present. Bar height is expected occurrences, not a count: each fossil is spread across the span it is dated to, so a tall narrow bar means tight dating and a low wide one means loose.
When
8 occurrencesThese are dates about fossils, not the animal: the record can only begin after it arose and end before it died out, so either end may reach further. Shares are expected occurrences: a fossil dated to a span is counted partly in each period it straddles. More on what this infers.
Found in
5 formations
- Lower Manchar Formation2
- Heti Formation1
- Krabi Basin B2 Formation1
- Na Khaem Formation1
- Caijiachong Formation1
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The named rock units Tarsiidae has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. 2 occurrences have no formation on record, which is common for older literature.
Tarsiidae and its relatives
MioceneWhere Tarsiidae and its relatives were recorded in the Miocene.
Found in the same rock
150 taxa- Copemys3 sites
- Diatomys3 sites
- Insectivora3 sites
- Kanisamys benjavuni3 sites
- Colubridae2 sites
- Emydidae2 sites
- Erinaceinae2 sites
- Galerix wesselsae2 sites
- Hesperotarsius sindhensis2 sites
- Kanisamys2 sites
- Myocricetodon2 sites
- Prokanisamys2 sites
- Sayimys2 sites
- Sciuridae2 sites
- Sindemys aguilari2 sites
- Stephanocemas rucha2 sites
- ? Homiodorcas sp.1 site
- Acrochordus1 site
- Adapidae1 site
- Adapoides troglodytes1 site
- Alligatoridae1 site
- Allognathosuchus1 site
- Amphipithecidae1 site
- Amynodontidae1 site
The Paleobiology Database records 8 sites for Tarsiidae, and this reads all of them. The number is how many of those sites it was catalogued from too. The 24 sharing the most are listed.
This is not a list of everything alive at the time. It is only what has come out of the same ground as this animal and been written down.
Entered from
7 references- The westernmost tarsier: A new genus and species from the Miocene of Pakistan2
- Oligocene primates from China reveal divergence between African and Asian primate evolution1
- A new Middle Miocene tarsier from Thailand and the reconstruction of its orbital morphology using a geometric– morphometric method1
- New primates from the late Eocene of Thailand: a contribution to primate diversity in the Paleogene of Asia1
- A new genus of Tarsiidae (Mammalia: Primates) from the middle Eocene of Shanxi Province, China, with notes on the historical biogeography of tarsiers1
- A diverse new primate fauna from middle Eocene fissure-fillings in southeastern China1
- First fossil marsupial from South Asia1
Each of the 8 occurrences read was entered from one of these publications, ordered by how many each accounts for. This is not a search for papers mentioning the name. Entries link to doi.org where the Paleobiology Database holds an identifier, and to its own record where it does not. Relayed as the Paleobiology Database holds them, not checked against what they resolve to.
Media and terms
Media content1
Picture of Tarsiidae
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Charles J. Sharp
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 4.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan was found. Smithsonian Open Access, MorphoSource and Sketchfab were all searched.
The description on this site
- Source
- Wikipedia, “Tarsier”
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 4.0
This is what the site found, which is not the same as what exists.
Keep going
What may have been alongside itTarsiiformes through timeFormations of the MioceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Gray 1825