They have characteristics that are more "primitive" (ancestral or plesiomorphic) than those of simians (monkeys, apes, and humans).
Prosimians are a paraphyletic group and not a clade (a group of an ancestor and all its descendants). Tarsiers share a more recent common ancestor with all simians than with the strepsirrhines. Consequently, the term "prosimian" is no longer an official term in taxonomy. It is still used to compare their behaviour with that of other primates.
Prosimians are the only primates native to Madagascar, but are also found throughout Africa and in Asia.
Notes
Adapiformes
Adapiformes are an extinct group of early primates. Adapiformes radiated throughout much of the northern continental mass, reaching as far south as northern Africa and tropical Asia. They lived from the Eocene to the Miocene epochs. Some adapiformes looked similar to living lemurs.
Adapiformes are known from the fossil record only, and it is unclear whether they form a monophyletic or paraphyletic group. When assumed to be a clade, they are usually grouped under the "wet-nosed" taxon Strepsirrhini, which would make them more closely related to the lemurs and less so to the "dry-nosed" Haplorhini taxon that includes monkeys and apes.
In 2009, Franzen and colleagues put the newly described genus "Darwinius" as a stem "missing link" between Strepsirrhini and Haplorhini. Later work on the "Darwinius" fossil by Erik Seiffert and colleagues rejected this "missing link" idea. They classify "Darwinius" and other adapiformes as Strepsirrhini.
The fossil record of the Adapiformes is quite considerable. The fossils are first found in the earliest Eocene, 55 million years ago (mya). They lived in four continents (North America, Africa, Europe and Asia). The Eocene was a period when the Earth was much warmer than today, with very extensive tropical forests, far more so than today. The widespread remains mean a much earlier origin, and molecular clock dates suggest that primates evolved more than 80–90 mya, nearly 40 million years before they appear in the fossil record.
Joan Carreras i Goicoechea
Joan Carreras i Goicoechea (born in Barcelona, 1962) is a Catalan journalist, screenwriter, and writer. He is a professor in the Faculty of Communication at Blanquerna. He teaches digital journalism. He worked for ten years at the broadcasting company Corporació Catalana de Mitjans Audiovisuals. He was the director of Canal 33. He was also the manager of the program "Info-K". At television channel 324.cat he tried out new formats and digital narratives. He has also worked for many newspapers, such as "Avui", "Diari de Barcelona" and "El Temps". In 2014, he received the Premi Sant Jordi de novel·la for his novel "L'àguila negra" (The black eagle).
Emili Rosales i Castellà
Emili Rosales i Castellà is a Catalan writer and editor. He began in the field of poetry, but quickly changed to writing novels. After publishing three books in four years, he dedicated five years to publish the fifth. The effort was rewarded when "La ciutat invisible" won the Sant Jordi award. It received good reviews. The novel has been translated to Spanish.
Rosales has also worked as a translator. He has been a literature professor. Occasionally he publishes book reviews in the press. He is the editorial director of Grup 62 (a publishing house) and Destino.
His works have been translated to German, English, Spanish, French, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Romanian, Serbian and Chinese.
John de Lancie
John Sherwood de Lancie, Jr. (born March 20, 1948) is an American actor, director, producer, writer, educator, sailor, voice artist, and comedian, best known for his role of Q in "" (1987–1994) and the voice of in "" (2010–2019). He is also known for his quite deep, resonant voice. De Lancie performed in "Days of Our Lives" (1982–1986; 1989–1990) as Eugene Bradford.
De Lancie was featured in several roles on television series, including Frank Simmons in "Stargate SG-1" (2001–2002) and Donald Margolis in "Breaking Bad" (2009–2010). He is noted for his public support of of the "My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic" fandom.
De Lancie was born John Sherwood de Lancie, Jr. in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on March 20, 1948 to John and Andrea de Lancie.
De Lancie attended Kent State University and the Juilliard School. He has appeared in several television series. These include "L.A. Law", "Days of Our Lives", "", "The Practice", and "Picket Fences". He has also appeared in "Stargate SG-1", "Breaking Bad", and "".
Sebastià Alzamora i Martín
Sebastià Alzamora i Martín (born in Llucmajor, Mallorca, 6 March 1972) is a writer and literary critic. He calls himself a member of the poetic group called Imparables.
Alzamora graduated from Balearic Islands University with a degree in Catalan philology. He first became well-known after releasing a book of poetry called "Rafel" (1994). "Rafel" won the Premi Salvador Espriu. He has also published "Apoteosi del Cercle" (1997), "Mula Morta" (2001), and "El Benestar" (2003).
As a narrator, he has published "L'extinció" (1999), "Sara i Jeremies" (2002), "La Pell i la Princesa" (2005), "Nit de L'ànima" (2007), "Miracle a Llucmajor" (2010), and "Dos Amics de Vint Anys" (2013). He wrote an essay about Gabriel Janer Manila called "L'escriptura del Foc" (1998). He also helped create "Imparables, Una antologia" (2004), and published "Dogmàtica Imparable" (2005) with Héctor Bofill and Manuel Forcano.
As a feature writer, Alzamora writes articles for the newspapers "Avui" and "Ara".
Since December 2007, he has been director of the magazine "Cultura".
Field-programmable gate array
A field-programmable gate array (often shortened to FPGA) is an electronic component used to build reconfigurable digital circuits. That means that an FPGA is different from a logic gate, because a logic gate has a fixed function. In contrast an FPGA has an undefined function at the time of manufacture. Before the FPGA can be used in a circuit it must be programmed, that is, reconfigured.
FPGAs are integrated circuits in the category of programmable logic devices or PLDs. FPGAs are the highest performance, most flexible and also the most expensive of the PLD types. A drawback of FPGAs compared to other PLDs is that they do not remember their design when the power is removed. An FPGA therefore needs a separate configuration memory chip that holds the FPGA design. When the power is given back to the FPGA a fixed part of the FPGA reads the configuration from the configuration memory chip. After the FPGA is configured it will be able to do the function it was given by the design.
An FPGA is different from a microprocessor or microcontroller. An FPGA in its basic form is not able to run software. Only when the FPGA is given a configuration that contains a processor-architecture it has the ability to run software.
FPGA manufacturers provide engineering software for Windows and sometimes also Linux, to develop designs for FPGAs. The design is commonly written in human readable computer files called a "hardware description language" (HDL). The most popular hardware description languages are VHDL and Verilog. Hardware description languages are strongly comparable to programming languages. But the intention of HDLs is to design digital logic circuits while programming languages design software.
The FPGA engineering software has to translate the abstract HDL code into the logic elements available in the selected FPGA. That is called logic synthesis. Then a process of place and route is done to position the logic elements in the FPGA. The result is a bitfile that can be programmed into the FPGA or the configuration memory. This is usually done with a USB programmer connected to the JTAG port of the FPGA.