Darwinius
Encyclopedia
Darwinius is a genus of Adapiformes
, a group of basal
primate
s from the Eocene
epoch
. Its only known species is Darwinius masillae, dated to 47 million years ago (Lutetian
stage) based on dating of the fossil site.
The only known fossil, dubbed Ida, was discovered in 1983 at the Messel pit
. The fossil, divided into a slab and partial counterslab
after the amateur excavation and sold separately, was not reassembled until 2007. The fossil is of a juvenile female, approximately 58 cm (22.8 in) overall length, with the head and body length excluding the tail being about 24 cm (9.4 in). It is estimated that Ida died at about 80–85% of her projected adult body and limb length.
The genus Darwinius was named in commemoration of the bicentenary
of the birth of Charles Darwin
, and the species name masillae honors Messel
where the specimen was found. The creature appeared superficially similar to a modern lemur
.
The authors of the paper describing Darwinius classified it as a member of the primate family
Notharctidae
, subfamily Cercamoniinae
, suggesting that it has the status of a significant transitional form (a "link") between the prosimian
and simian
("anthropoid") primate lineages. Others have disagreed with this placement.
Concerns have been raised about the claims made about the fossil's relative importance, and the publicising of the fossil before adequate information was available for scrutiny by the academic community.
subfamily of the Notharctidae
family within the extinct Adapiformes
suborder of early primate
s.
Darwinius masillae is the third primate species to be discovered at the
Messel locality that belongs to the cercamoniine adapiforms, in
addition to Europolemur koenigswaldi and Europolemur kelleri. Darwinius masillae is similar but not directly related to Godinotia neglecta from Geiseltal
.
The adapiforms are early primates which are known only from the fossil record, and it is unclear whether they form a suborder proper, or a paraphyletic grouping. They are usually grouped under Strepsirrhini
—including Lemur
s, Aye-aye
s and Lorisiformes
—and as such would not be ancestral to Haplorrhini
which includes tarsier
s and simian
s. Simians are usually called anthropoids, and while this name can be confusing, the paper uses the term anthropoids, as does associated publicity material. Simians (anthropoids) include monkeys and ape
s, which in turn includes humans.
Franzen et al. in their 2009 paper place Darwinius in the "Adapoidea
group of early primates representative of early haplorhine diversification". This means that according to these authors, the adapiforms would not be entirely within the Strepsirrhini lineage as hitherto assumed but would qualify as a transitional fossil (a "missing link") between Strepsirrhini and Haplorrhini, and so could be ancestral to humans. They also suggest that tarsiers have been misplaced in the Haplorrhini, and should be considered Strepsirrhini. To support this view, they show that as many as 6 morphological traits found in "Darwinius" are derived
characters present only in the Haplorrhini lineage but absent in the Strepsirrhini lineage, which they interpret as synapomorphies
. These include, among others, a cranium with a short rostrum, deep mandibular ramus, loss of all grooming claws. They note "that Darwinius masillae, and adapoids contemporary with early tarsioids, could represent a stem group from which later anthropoid primates evolved, but we are not advocating this here, nor do we consider either Darwinius or adapoids to be anthropoids."
compared only 30 traits, when standard practice is to analyze 200 to 400 traits and to include fossils such as anthropoids from Egypt and the primate genus Eosimias
which were not included in the analysis. This contrasts with the motive openly stated by the authors, which was to list 30 anatomical and morphological characteristics "commonly used" to distinguish extant strepsirrhine and haplorrhine primates. Paleontologist Richard Kay of Duke University
thought the data could have been cherry-picked, and paleontologist Callum Ross of the University of Chicago
considered the claim that Darwinius should be classified as haplorhine was "unsupportable in light of modern methods of classification." The opinion of Chris Beard, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History
, was that Darwinius was not a "missing link" between anthropoids and more primitive primates, but that further study of this remarkably complete specimen would be very informative and could reveal relationships amongst "the earliest and least human-like of all known primates, the Eocene adapiforms." In an interview published on 27 May, Jørn Hurum
stated that he had an open mind about the possibility that the fossil might turn out to be a lemur, and that a paper on systematics to be published within about a year would mainly focus on the partial counterslab containing the inner ear and the foot bones.
Most experts hold that the higher primates (simians) evolved from Tarsiidae, branching off the Strepsirrhini before the appearance of the Adapiformes. A smaller group agrees with Franzen et al. that the higher primates descend from Adapiformes (Adapoidea). The view of paleontologist Tim White
is that Darwinius is unlikely to end the argument.
Philip D. Gingerich
states that the seven superfamilies
of Primates are commonly associated in the higher taxonomic groupings of suborders Anthropoidea and Prosimii
as an alternative to Haplorhini and Strepsirrhini, depending on the position of Adapoidea and Tarsioidea. He puts forward a phylogeny in which the higher primates evolved from Darwinius, which he groups with other Adapoidea. He shows the Adapoidea together the Tarsioidea as representing early diversification of the suborder Haplorhini, and shows the Strepsirrhini as having branched off directly from the earliest primates. The Revealing the Link website uses this taxonomic grouping, and states that Darwinii is from an early group of primates, just prior to diversification into the anthropoids (monkeys, apes and humans) and the prosimians (lemurs, lorises and tarsiers).
Erik Seiffert and colleagues at Stony Brook University argue that Darwinius is on the branch towards the Strepsirrhini, and is not a 'missing link' in the evolution of the Anthropoidea. A phylogenetic analysis of 360 morphological characters in 117 extinct and modern primates places Darwinius in a now-extinct group of strepsirrhines, along with a newly discovered 37-million-year-old Egyptian primate, Afradapis. Seiffert believes that characteristics that appeared to show a relationship to haplorrhines are due to convergent evolution, and has said that "the PR hype surrounding the Darwinius description was very confusing.”
The type specimen is a 95%-complete fossil
, missing only its left rear leg. It has been named Ida after the daughter of Jørn Hurum
, the Norwegian vertebrate paleontologist from the Natural History Museum, University of Oslo, who secured one section of the fossil from an anonymous owner, and led the research. In addition to the bones, remains of Ida's soft tissue and fur outline are present, along with remnants of her last meal of fruit and leaves. The animal is about 58 cm (22.8 in) from nose to tail, or roughly the size of a small, long-tailed cat.
The lemur
-like skeleton of the fossil features primate characteristics of grasping hands with opposable thumbs and nails instead of claws. These would have provided a "precision grip" which, for Ida, was useful for climbing and gathering fruit. Ida also has flexible arms and relatively short limbs. The fossil is missing two anatomical features found in modern lemurs: a grooming claw
on the foot and a fused row of teeth, a toothcomb
, in the bottom jaw.
Digital reconstructions of Ida's teeth reveal that she has unerupted molars
in her jaw
, indicating by comparison with modern squirrel monkey
s that she was 9–10 months old, and would have reached adulthood at 36 months. The shape of Ida's teeth provides clues as to her diet; jagged molars would have allowed her to slice food, suggesting that she was a leaf and seed eater. This is confirmed by the remarkable preservation of her gut content. Furthermore the lack of a baculum
(penis bone) found in all lower primates means that the fossil was from a female. X-rays performed on Ida revealed that her right wrist was healing from a fracture, which may have contributed to her death. The scientists speculate whether she was overcome by carbon dioxide
fumes while drinking from the Messel lake. Hampered by her broken wrist, she slipped into unconsciousness, was washed into the lake and sank to the bottom, where unique fossilisation conditions preserved her for 47 million years.
The events regarding the original unearthing of the fossil are not clear, though some facts are known. It was found at the Messel pit in 1983, a disused shale
quarry
noted for its astonishing fossil preservation, near the village of Messel
, about 35 km (21.7 mi) southeast of Frankfurt am Main in Germany
. The fossil came as a slab and partial counter slab, and was expertly prepared by encasing each slab in resin using the transfer technique
necessary to conserve Messel fossils. At some point the slab and counter slab went separate ways. The counter slab was incorporated in a composite of fabricated parts to represent a complete specimen, and arrived at a private Wyoming museum in 1991. Analysis by Jens Franzen of the Natural History Museum of Basel
, Switzerland
revealed the mixed actual and faked nature of this slab. A comparison of the two slabs indicates that the forger had access to the whole fossil.
The primary slab remained in Germany, in the possession of a private collector who kept it secret for twenty years before deciding to sell it anonymously via a German fossil dealer. Two German museums turned it down as too expensive, then a year later at the Hamburg Fossil and Mineral Fair in December 2006 the dealer asked Norwegian vertebrate palaeontologist Jørn Hurum, who had done some previous deals, to discuss something privately. The dealer showed Hurum three high resolution colour photographs of the fossil, and told him that the asking price was $1 million. Hurum knew that it was a primate, and according to Tudge's book "was fast concluding that the specimen he was looking at could be one of the holy grails of science — the 'missing link' from the crucial time period." He asked for time until after Christmas to organise funding to pay for the specimen and ensure that it had been legally collected, had an export permit and would be legitimately available for study. His first choice was the Natural History Museum of Oslo, but it was beyond their means and he began to think of other museums with sponsors available. He persuaded the Oslo museum to make half the funding available, with the remainder to be paid only after X-ray scans proved conclusively that it was not a fake, a process which took several months. He put together a team including leading German experts on the Messel fossils, ensuring international ownership.
After its acquisition it was studied in secret for two years by a team of scientists led by Hurum; who was joined by primate evolution expert Professor Philip Gingerich of the University of Michigan
, and palaeontologists Jens Franzen who had studied the counter slab and Jörg Habersetzer of the Senckenberg Museum
's Research Institute.
, an open access journal of the Public Library of Science
. The paper for publication was received by PLoS ONE on March 19, 2009, and accepted on May 12, 2009.
On May 10, 2009, the Daily Mail
published reports that the BBC had made a documentary revealing the discovery of what might be a vital ‘missing link’ in human evolution, giving an outline of the study and its intended publication date as well as a brief statement from Gingerich. On 15 May the Wall Street Journal carried a report with interviews with Gingerich and with Tim White
, who cautioned that "Lemur advocates will be delighted, but tarsier advocates will be underwhelmed". At about the same time a press release headed "World Renowned Scientists Reveal a Revolutionary Scientific Find That Will Change Everything" announced that the find was "lauded as the most significant scientific discovery of recent times."
On May 19, 2009, the team revealed their findings to the world at a press conference, simultaneously with online publication of the paper in PLoS ONE (for naming purposes, the paper was officially published in print on May 21, 2009). The paper included a statement that the authors were not advocating the possibility that the species could be ancestral to later anthropoid primates; Professor John Fleagle, of Stony Brook University in New York state, asserted that he was one of the anonymous scientific reviewers of the paper, and that he had explicitly requested before publication that the authors tone down their original claims that the fossil was on the human evolutionary line. At the press conference, the fossil was described as the "missing link" in human evolution. Hurum said that “This fossil rewrites our understanding of the evolution of primates... It will probably be pictured in all the textbooks for the next 100 years," and compared its importance to the Mona Lisa
. He also said that Darwinius was "the closest thing we can get to a direct ancestor" and that finding it was "a dream come true". Team member Jens Franzen said the state of preservation was "like the Eighth Wonder of the World", with information "palaeontologists can normally only dream of", but while he said it bore "a close resemblance to ourselves" in some aspects, other features indicated that it was not a direct ancestor.
Independent experts were quick to question the claims. Henry Gee
, a senior editor at Nature
, said the term "missing link" was misleading and that the scientific community would need to evaluate its significance, which was unlikely to match that of Homo floresiensis
or feathered dinosaurs. Chris Beard, curator of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History
, said he "would be absolutely dumbfounded if it turns out to be a potential ancestor to humans."
Having previously experienced how the blogosphere
had picked up on his work, and seen Chinese dinosaur finds the object of bad early descriptions from blogging, Jørn Hurum decided to orchestrate launch of the fossil in a combined scientific and public event. Atlantic Productions
, which had cooperated with Hurum on a program on the Predator X
, a giant pliosaur
from Svalbard
, was brought in on the project in order to "take story straight to the masses in a way that would appeal to the average person, especially kids".
The press conference and paper on the fossil was accompanied by the launch of a website, the publication of a book which had already been distributed to bookstores, The Link: Uncovering Our Earliest Ancestor by Colin Tudge
, and the announcement of a documentary (Uncovering Our Earliest Ancestor: The Link), made by Atlantic Productions
in the UK, directed by Tim Walker and produced by Lucie Ridout, to be screened six days later on the History Channel (US), BBC One
(UK), and various stations in Germany and Norway. The New York Daily News noted that "The unveiling of the fossil came as part of an orchestrated publicity campaign unusual for scientific discoveries".
One of the paper's co-authors, paleontologist Philip D. Gingerich
, expressed dissatisfaction with the media campaign, telling The Wall Street Journal
that they had chosen to publish in PLoS ONE as "There was a TV company involved and time pressure" and they had been pushed to finish the study. "It's not how I like to do science", Gingerich concluded. In an interview, Jørn Hurum
said that PLoS ONE had been chosen as it was open access and the research had been funded by Norwegian taxpayers who would benefit from free access, it did not restrict the length of manuscript or number of illustrations, and "PLoS ONE is the quickest way to publish a large work in the world!"
At the time its discovery was announced in the scientific and the popular press, the fossil was characterized as the "most complete fossil primate ever discovered"; Sir David Attenborough
has described it as "extraordinary". Google
commemorated the unveiling with a themed logo on May 20, 2009. During a ceremony at the American Museum of Natural History
Hurum said that "This specimen is like finding the Lost Ark
for archeologists" and "It is the scientific equivalent of the Holy Grail
. This fossil will probably be the one that will be pictured in all textbooks for the next 100 years." Regarding the publicity, Matt Cartmill an anthropologist from Duke University said "The P.R. campaign on this fossil is I think more of a story than the fossil itself".
Independent experts have raised concern about publicity exaggerating the importance of the find before information was available for scrutiny. Chris Beard, curator of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History
, was "awestruck" by the publicity machine but concerned that if the hype was exaggerated, it could damage the popularisation of science if the creature was not all that it was hyped up to be. Paleoanthropologist Elwyn Simons of Duke University
stated that it is a wonderful specimen but most of the information had been previously known, and paleoanthropologist Peter Brown of the University of New England
said that the paper had insufficient evidence that Darwinius was ancestral to the simians. Others have also criticized claims that the fossil represents the "missing link in human evolution", arguing that there is no such thing unless evolution is visualized as a chain
as there are an enormous number of missing branches
, and that while the fossil is a primate, there is no evidence to suggest that its species is a direct ancestor of humans. ScienceBlogger
Brian Switek questioned the sensationalist coverage of claims of ancestral relationships made before a full cladistic analysis
, and in a column in The Times
he stated that a unique opportunity to communicate science had been lost, with press releases forestalling the necessary discovery and debate which should now proceed.
Hurum considered that the risk of buying the fossil had paid off, and said that "You need an icon or two in a museum to drag people in, this is our Mona Lisa and it will be our Mona Lisa for the next 100 years." He has been described as "a modern-era, media-savvy scientist with the right amounts of showmanship, populist sensibility, and disregard for the normal avenues of scientific prestige required to pull this off". The debut in "an astonishingly slick, multi-component media package" required exceptional coordination between networks, museums, producers and scientists while maintaining a level of secrecy which is hard to attain in modern circumstances. In interviews published on 27 May, Hurum stated that it was good that they had got the message out that primates were rooted deep in time, but that some of the slogans were too much and the publicity got completely out of control. He disclosed that he paid nearly $750,000 (£465,000) for the specimen, but felt it was worthwhile to make the fossil available for scientific investigation instead of it being bought by a private collector and hidden away. Others including Chris Beard were concerned that the price and publicity could lead to profiteering by amateur collectors, and make acquisition of specimens for research purposes more difficult.
Adapiformes
Adapiformes are an extinct group of primitive primates.The adapiformes radiated throughout much of the northern continental mass, reaching as far south as northern Africa and tropical Asia. The adapiformes existed from the Eocene to the Miocene epoch...
, a group of basal
Basal (phylogenetics)
In phylogenetics, a basal clade is the earliest clade to branch in a larger clade; it appears at the base of a cladogram.A basal group forms an outgroup to the rest of the clade, such as in the following example:...
primate
Primate
A primate is a mammal of the order Primates , which contains prosimians and simians. Primates arose from ancestors that lived in the trees of tropical forests; many primate characteristics represent adaptations to life in this challenging three-dimensional environment...
s from the Eocene
Eocene
The Eocene Epoch, lasting from about 56 to 34 million years ago , is a major division of the geologic timescale and the second epoch of the Paleogene Period in the Cenozoic Era. The Eocene spans the time from the end of the Palaeocene Epoch to the beginning of the Oligocene Epoch. The start of the...
epoch
Geologic time scale
The geologic time scale provides a system of chronologic measurement relating stratigraphy to time that is used by geologists, paleontologists and other earth scientists to describe the timing and relationships between events that have occurred during the history of the Earth...
. Its only known species is Darwinius masillae, dated to 47 million years ago (Lutetian
Lutetian
The Lutetian is, in the geologic timescale, a stage or age in the Eocene. It spans the time between and . The Lutetian is preceded by the Ypresian and is followed by the Bartonian. Together with the Bartonian it is sometimes referred to as the Middle Eocene subepoch...
stage) based on dating of the fossil site.
The only known fossil, dubbed Ida, was discovered in 1983 at the Messel pit
Messel pit
The Messel Pit is a disused quarry near the village of Messel, about southeast of Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Bituminous shale was mined there. Because of its abundance of fossils, it has significant geological and scientific importance...
. The fossil, divided into a slab and partial counterslab
Counter slab
Counter slab and slab are the matching halves of a fossil-bearing matrix formed in sedimentary deposits. When excavated the matrix may be split along the natural grain or cleavage of the rock. A fossil embedded in the sediment may then also split down the middle, with fossil remains sticking to...
after the amateur excavation and sold separately, was not reassembled until 2007. The fossil is of a juvenile female, approximately 58 cm (22.8 in) overall length, with the head and body length excluding the tail being about 24 cm (9.4 in). It is estimated that Ida died at about 80–85% of her projected adult body and limb length.
The genus Darwinius was named in commemoration of the bicentenary
Commemoration of Charles Darwin
Commemoration of Charles Darwin began while Darwin was still on the Beagle survey voyage, and continued with his increasing fame. Many geographical features, species and institutions bear his name...
of the birth of Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin
Charles Robert Darwin FRS was an English naturalist. He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestry, and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection.He published his theory...
, and the species name masillae honors Messel
Messel pit
The Messel Pit is a disused quarry near the village of Messel, about southeast of Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Bituminous shale was mined there. Because of its abundance of fossils, it has significant geological and scientific importance...
where the specimen was found. The creature appeared superficially similar to a modern lemur
Lemur
Lemurs are a clade of strepsirrhine primates endemic to the island of Madagascar. They are named after the lemures of Roman mythology due to the ghostly vocalizations, reflective eyes, and the nocturnal habits of some species...
.
The authors of the paper describing Darwinius classified it as a member of the primate family
Family (biology)
In biological classification, family is* a taxonomic rank. Other well-known ranks are life, domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, genus, and species, with family fitting between order and genus. As for the other well-known ranks, there is the option of an immediately lower rank, indicated by the...
Notharctidae
Notharctidae
Notharctidae is an extinct family of primitive primates.- Classification :*Family Notharctidae**Subfamily Cercamoniinae***Genus Anchomomys***Genus Buxella***Genus Darwinius***Genus Donrussellia***Genus Europolemur...
, subfamily Cercamoniinae
Cercamoniinae
Cercamoniinae is a subfamily within the extinct primate family Notharctidae.- Classification :*Family Notharctidae**Subfamily Cercamoniinae***Genus Anchomomys***Genus Buxella***Genus Darwinius***Genus Donrussellia...
, suggesting that it has the status of a significant transitional form (a "link") between the prosimian
Prosimian
Prosimians are a grouping of mammals defined as being primates, but not monkeys or apes. They include, among others, lemurs, bushbabies, and tarsiers. They are considered to have characteristics that are more primitive than those of monkeys and apes. Prosimians are the only primates native to...
and simian
Simian
The simians are the "higher primates" familiar to most people: the Old World monkeys and apes, including humans, , and the New World monkeys or platyrrhines. Simians tend to be larger than the "lower primates" or prosimians.- Classification and evolution :The simians are split into three groups...
("anthropoid") primate lineages. Others have disagreed with this placement.
Concerns have been raised about the claims made about the fossil's relative importance, and the publicising of the fossil before adequate information was available for scrutiny by the academic community.
Taxonomy
Franzen et al. (2009) place the Darwinius genus in the CercamoniinaeCercamoniinae
Cercamoniinae is a subfamily within the extinct primate family Notharctidae.- Classification :*Family Notharctidae**Subfamily Cercamoniinae***Genus Anchomomys***Genus Buxella***Genus Darwinius***Genus Donrussellia...
subfamily of the Notharctidae
Notharctidae
Notharctidae is an extinct family of primitive primates.- Classification :*Family Notharctidae**Subfamily Cercamoniinae***Genus Anchomomys***Genus Buxella***Genus Darwinius***Genus Donrussellia***Genus Europolemur...
family within the extinct Adapiformes
Adapiformes
Adapiformes are an extinct group of primitive primates.The adapiformes radiated throughout much of the northern continental mass, reaching as far south as northern Africa and tropical Asia. The adapiformes existed from the Eocene to the Miocene epoch...
suborder of early primate
Primate
A primate is a mammal of the order Primates , which contains prosimians and simians. Primates arose from ancestors that lived in the trees of tropical forests; many primate characteristics represent adaptations to life in this challenging three-dimensional environment...
s.
Darwinius masillae is the third primate species to be discovered at the
Messel locality that belongs to the cercamoniine adapiforms, in
addition to Europolemur koenigswaldi and Europolemur kelleri. Darwinius masillae is similar but not directly related to Godinotia neglecta from Geiseltal
Geiseltal
The Geisel valley is a valley in Saxony-Anhalt, Germany, situated west of Merseburg, Saalekreis district. It is named after the River Geisel which rises in Mücheln and is a tributary of the Saale, just under 25 km long....
.
The adapiforms are early primates which are known only from the fossil record, and it is unclear whether they form a suborder proper, or a paraphyletic grouping. They are usually grouped under Strepsirrhini
Strepsirrhini
The clade Strepsirrhini is one of the two suborders of primates. Madagascar's only non-human primates are strepsirrhines, and others can be found in southeast Asia and Africa...
—including Lemur
Lemur
Lemurs are a clade of strepsirrhine primates endemic to the island of Madagascar. They are named after the lemures of Roman mythology due to the ghostly vocalizations, reflective eyes, and the nocturnal habits of some species...
s, Aye-aye
Aye-aye
The aye-aye is a lemur, a strepsirrhine primate native to Madagascar that combines rodent-like teeth and a special thin middle finger to fill the same ecological niche as a woodpecker...
s and Lorisiformes
Lorisiformes
Lorisiformes are a group of primates found throughout Africa and Asia. Members of this infraorder include the galagos and the lorises. As strepsirrhines, they are related to the lemurs.* Order Primates** Suborder Strepsirrhini: non-tarsier prosimians...
—and as such would not be ancestral to Haplorrhini
Haplorrhini
The haplorhines, the "dry-nosed" primates , are members of the Haplorhini clade: the prosimian tarsiers and the anthropoids...
which includes tarsier
Tarsier
Tarsiers are haplorrhine primates of the genus Tarsius, a genus in the family Tarsiidae, which is itself the lone extant family within the infraorder Tarsiiformes...
s and simian
Simian
The simians are the "higher primates" familiar to most people: the Old World monkeys and apes, including humans, , and the New World monkeys or platyrrhines. Simians tend to be larger than the "lower primates" or prosimians.- Classification and evolution :The simians are split into three groups...
s. Simians are usually called anthropoids, and while this name can be confusing, the paper uses the term anthropoids, as does associated publicity material. Simians (anthropoids) include monkeys and ape
Ape
Apes are Old World anthropoid mammals, more specifically a clade of tailless catarrhine primates, belonging to the biological superfamily Hominoidea. The apes are native to Africa and South-east Asia, although in relatively recent times humans have spread all over the world...
s, which in turn includes humans.
Adapid
Adapids are a diverse group of extinct primates that primarily radiated during the Eocene epoch between about 55 and 34 million years ago. However, one specialized endemic Asian group survived into the Miocene. Fossils of adapids are known from North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa...
group of early primates representative of early haplorhine diversification". This means that according to these authors, the adapiforms would not be entirely within the Strepsirrhini lineage as hitherto assumed but would qualify as a transitional fossil (a "missing link") between Strepsirrhini and Haplorrhini, and so could be ancestral to humans. They also suggest that tarsiers have been misplaced in the Haplorrhini, and should be considered Strepsirrhini. To support this view, they show that as many as 6 morphological traits found in "Darwinius" are derived
Synapomorphy
In cladistics, a synapomorphy or synapomorphic character is a trait that is shared by two or more taxa and their most recent common ancestor, whose ancestor in turn does not possess the trait. A synapomorphy is thus an apomorphy visible in multiple taxa, where the trait in question originates in...
characters present only in the Haplorrhini lineage but absent in the Strepsirrhini lineage, which they interpret as synapomorphies
Synapomorphy
In cladistics, a synapomorphy or synapomorphic character is a trait that is shared by two or more taxa and their most recent common ancestor, whose ancestor in turn does not possess the trait. A synapomorphy is thus an apomorphy visible in multiple taxa, where the trait in question originates in...
. These include, among others, a cranium with a short rostrum, deep mandibular ramus, loss of all grooming claws. They note "that Darwinius masillae, and adapoids contemporary with early tarsioids, could represent a stem group from which later anthropoid primates evolved, but we are not advocating this here, nor do we consider either Darwinius or adapoids to be anthropoids."
Concerns over cladistic analysis
Paleontologists have expressed concern that the cladistic analysisCladistics
Cladistics is a method of classifying species of organisms into groups called clades, which consist of an ancestor organism and all its descendants . For example, birds, dinosaurs, crocodiles, and all descendants of their most recent common ancestor form a clade...
compared only 30 traits, when standard practice is to analyze 200 to 400 traits and to include fossils such as anthropoids from Egypt and the primate genus Eosimias
Eosimias
Eosimias was a genus of early primates, first discovered and identified in 1999 from fossils collected in the Shanghuang fissure-fillings of the southern Jiangsu Province, China. It is a part of the family Eosimiidae, which includes three known species: Eosimias sinensis, Eosimias centennicus, and...
which were not included in the analysis. This contrasts with the motive openly stated by the authors, which was to list 30 anatomical and morphological characteristics "commonly used" to distinguish extant strepsirrhine and haplorrhine primates. Paleontologist Richard Kay of Duke University
Duke University
Duke University is a private research university located in Durham, North Carolina, United States. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present day town of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco industrialist James B...
thought the data could have been cherry-picked, and paleontologist Callum Ross of the University of Chicago
University of Chicago
The University of Chicago is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by the American Baptist Education Society with a donation from oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller and incorporated in 1890...
considered the claim that Darwinius should be classified as haplorhine was "unsupportable in light of modern methods of classification." The opinion of Chris Beard, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History
Carnegie Museum of Natural History
Carnegie Museum of Natural History, located at 4400 Forbes Avenue in the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, was founded by the Pittsburgh-based industrialist Andrew Carnegie in 1896...
, was that Darwinius was not a "missing link" between anthropoids and more primitive primates, but that further study of this remarkably complete specimen would be very informative and could reveal relationships amongst "the earliest and least human-like of all known primates, the Eocene adapiforms." In an interview published on 27 May, Jørn Hurum
Jørn Hurum
Jørn Harald Hurum is a Norwegian paleontologist and popularizer of science. He is a vertebrate paleontologist and holds an Associate Professor position at the Natural History Museum of the University of Oslo. He has studied dinosaurs, primitive mammals and plesiosaurs.- Media :Hurum is known as a...
stated that he had an open mind about the possibility that the fossil might turn out to be a lemur, and that a paper on systematics to be published within about a year would mainly focus on the partial counterslab containing the inner ear and the foot bones.
Most experts hold that the higher primates (simians) evolved from Tarsiidae, branching off the Strepsirrhini before the appearance of the Adapiformes. A smaller group agrees with Franzen et al. that the higher primates descend from Adapiformes (Adapoidea). The view of paleontologist Tim White
Tim White (anthropologist)
Tim D. White is an American Paleoanthropologist and Professor of Integrative Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is most famous for his work on Lucy as Australopithecus afarensis with discoverer Donald Johanson.-Career:White was born in Los Angeles County, California...
is that Darwinius is unlikely to end the argument.
Philip D. Gingerich
Philip D. Gingerich
Philip D. Gingerich is a Professor of Paleontology, Professor of Geological Sciences, Professor of Biology, Professor of Anthropology and Director, Museum of Paleontology at the University of Michigan. His research focus is in vertebrate paleontology, especially the Paleocene-Eocene transition and...
states that the seven superfamilies
Taxonomic rank
In biological classification, rank is the level in a taxonomic hierarchy. Examples of taxonomic ranks are species, genus, family, and class. Each rank subsumes under it a number of less general categories...
of Primates are commonly associated in the higher taxonomic groupings of suborders Anthropoidea and Prosimii
Prosimian
Prosimians are a grouping of mammals defined as being primates, but not monkeys or apes. They include, among others, lemurs, bushbabies, and tarsiers. They are considered to have characteristics that are more primitive than those of monkeys and apes. Prosimians are the only primates native to...
as an alternative to Haplorhini and Strepsirrhini, depending on the position of Adapoidea and Tarsioidea. He puts forward a phylogeny in which the higher primates evolved from Darwinius, which he groups with other Adapoidea. He shows the Adapoidea together the Tarsioidea as representing early diversification of the suborder Haplorhini, and shows the Strepsirrhini as having branched off directly from the earliest primates. The Revealing the Link website uses this taxonomic grouping, and states that Darwinii is from an early group of primates, just prior to diversification into the anthropoids (monkeys, apes and humans) and the prosimians (lemurs, lorises and tarsiers).
Erik Seiffert and colleagues at Stony Brook University argue that Darwinius is on the branch towards the Strepsirrhini, and is not a 'missing link' in the evolution of the Anthropoidea. A phylogenetic analysis of 360 morphological characters in 117 extinct and modern primates places Darwinius in a now-extinct group of strepsirrhines, along with a newly discovered 37-million-year-old Egyptian primate, Afradapis. Seiffert believes that characteristics that appeared to show a relationship to haplorrhines are due to convergent evolution, and has said that "the PR hype surrounding the Darwinius description was very confusing.”
Type specimen
Fossil
Fossils are the preserved remains or traces of animals , plants, and other organisms from the remote past...
, missing only its left rear leg. It has been named Ida after the daughter of Jørn Hurum
Jørn Hurum
Jørn Harald Hurum is a Norwegian paleontologist and popularizer of science. He is a vertebrate paleontologist and holds an Associate Professor position at the Natural History Museum of the University of Oslo. He has studied dinosaurs, primitive mammals and plesiosaurs.- Media :Hurum is known as a...
, the Norwegian vertebrate paleontologist from the Natural History Museum, University of Oslo, who secured one section of the fossil from an anonymous owner, and led the research. In addition to the bones, remains of Ida's soft tissue and fur outline are present, along with remnants of her last meal of fruit and leaves. The animal is about 58 cm (22.8 in) from nose to tail, or roughly the size of a small, long-tailed cat.
The lemur
Lemur
Lemurs are a clade of strepsirrhine primates endemic to the island of Madagascar. They are named after the lemures of Roman mythology due to the ghostly vocalizations, reflective eyes, and the nocturnal habits of some species...
-like skeleton of the fossil features primate characteristics of grasping hands with opposable thumbs and nails instead of claws. These would have provided a "precision grip" which, for Ida, was useful for climbing and gathering fruit. Ida also has flexible arms and relatively short limbs. The fossil is missing two anatomical features found in modern lemurs: a grooming claw
Toilet-claw
A toilet-claw is the specialized claw or nail on the foot of certain primates, used for personal grooming. All prosimians have a toilet claw, but the digit that is specialized in this manner varies. Tarsiers have a toilet claw on toe two and toe three...
on the foot and a fused row of teeth, a toothcomb
Toothcomb
A toothcomb is an anatomical structure found in strepsirrhine primates, which includes lemurs, lorises and galagos. A toothcomb consists of long, flat forward-angled teeth, and includes the lower incisors and the canine teeth...
, in the bottom jaw.
Digital reconstructions of Ida's teeth reveal that she has unerupted molars
Molar (tooth)
Molars are the rearmost and most complicated kind of tooth in most mammals. In many mammals they grind food; hence the Latin name mola, "millstone"....
in her jaw
Jaw
The jaw is any opposable articulated structure at the entrance of the mouth, typically used for grasping and manipulating food. The term jaws is also broadly applied to the whole of the structures constituting the vault of the mouth and serving to open and close it and is part of the body plan of...
, indicating by comparison with modern squirrel monkey
Squirrel monkey
The squirrel monkeys are the New World monkeys of the genus Saimiri. They are the only genus in the subfamily Saimirinae.Squirrel monkeys live in the tropical forests of Central and South America in the canopy layer. Most species have parapatric or allopatric ranges in the Amazon, while S...
s that she was 9–10 months old, and would have reached adulthood at 36 months. The shape of Ida's teeth provides clues as to her diet; jagged molars would have allowed her to slice food, suggesting that she was a leaf and seed eater. This is confirmed by the remarkable preservation of her gut content. Furthermore the lack of a baculum
Baculum
The baculum is a bone found in the penis of most mammals. It is absent in humans, but present in other primates, such as the gorilla and chimpanzee.The bone aids in sexual intercourse.-Purpose:...
(penis bone) found in all lower primates means that the fossil was from a female. X-rays performed on Ida revealed that her right wrist was healing from a fracture, which may have contributed to her death. The scientists speculate whether she was overcome by carbon dioxide
Carbon dioxide
Carbon dioxide is a naturally occurring chemical compound composed of two oxygen atoms covalently bonded to a single carbon atom...
fumes while drinking from the Messel lake. Hampered by her broken wrist, she slipped into unconsciousness, was washed into the lake and sank to the bottom, where unique fossilisation conditions preserved her for 47 million years.
Discovery and acquisition
Shale
Shale is a fine-grained, clastic sedimentary rock composed of mud that is a mix of flakes of clay minerals and tiny fragments of other minerals, especially quartz and calcite. The ratio of clay to other minerals is variable. Shale is characterized by breaks along thin laminae or parallel layering...
quarry
Quarry
A quarry is a type of open-pit mine from which rock or minerals are extracted. Quarries are generally used for extracting building materials, such as dimension stone, construction aggregate, riprap, sand, and gravel. They are often collocated with concrete and asphalt plants due to the requirement...
noted for its astonishing fossil preservation, near the village of Messel
Messel
Messel is a municipality in the district of Darmstadt-Dieburg in Hesse near Frankfurt am Main in Germany.The village is first mentioned, as Masilla, in the Lorsch codex.Messel was the property of the lords of Groschlag from ca. 1400 to 1799...
, about 35 km (21.7 mi) southeast of Frankfurt am Main in Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
. The fossil came as a slab and partial counter slab, and was expertly prepared by encasing each slab in resin using the transfer technique
Transfer technique
The transfer technique is a technique to stabilise and prepare fossils by partially embedding them in plastic resins in order to preserve the position of the preserved fossil once all of the rock matrix is subsequently removed...
necessary to conserve Messel fossils. At some point the slab and counter slab went separate ways. The counter slab was incorporated in a composite of fabricated parts to represent a complete specimen, and arrived at a private Wyoming museum in 1991. Analysis by Jens Franzen of the Natural History Museum of Basel
Natural History Museum of Basel
With a heritage dating back over 300 years, the Natural History Museum of Basel in Basel, Switzerland, houses wide-ranging collections primarily focused on the fields of zoology, entomology, mineralogy, anthropology, osteology and paleontology...
, Switzerland
Switzerland
Switzerland name of one of the Swiss cantons. ; ; ; or ), in its full name the Swiss Confederation , is a federal republic consisting of 26 cantons, with Bern as the seat of the federal authorities. The country is situated in Western Europe,Or Central Europe depending on the definition....
revealed the mixed actual and faked nature of this slab. A comparison of the two slabs indicates that the forger had access to the whole fossil.
After its acquisition it was studied in secret for two years by a team of scientists led by Hurum; who was joined by primate evolution expert Professor Philip Gingerich of the University of Michigan
University of Michigan
The University of Michigan is a public research university located in Ann Arbor, Michigan in the United States. It is the state's oldest university and the flagship campus of the University of Michigan...
, and palaeontologists Jens Franzen who had studied the counter slab and Jörg Habersetzer of the Senckenberg Museum
Senckenberg Museum
The Naturmuseum Senckenberg in Frankfurt is the second largest museum of natural history in Germany. It is particularly popular with children, who enjoy the extensive collection of dinosaur skeletons: Senckenberg boasts the largest exhibition of large dinosaurs in Europe. One particular treasure is...
's Research Institute.
Publication
While studies were in progress, negotiations were put in place for a book and with various broadcasters for documentary programs, all of whom agreed to keep the project secret. A deal went through in the summer of 2008 with The History Channel which has been reported as paying more for this than any other documentary. The team decided to publish their findings online in PLoS ONEPLoS ONE
PLoS ONE is an open access peer-reviewed scientific journal published by the Public Library of Science since 2006. It covers primary research from any discipline within science and medicine. All submissions go through an internal and external pre-publication peer review but are not excluded on the...
, an open access journal of the Public Library of Science
Public Library of Science
The Public Library of Science is a nonprofit open-access scientific publishing project aimed at creating a library of open access journals and other scientific literature under an open content license...
. The paper for publication was received by PLoS ONE on March 19, 2009, and accepted on May 12, 2009.
On May 10, 2009, the Daily Mail
Daily Mail
The Daily Mail is a British daily middle-market tabloid newspaper owned by the Daily Mail and General Trust. First published in 1896 by Lord Northcliffe, it is the United Kingdom's second biggest-selling daily newspaper after The Sun. Its sister paper The Mail on Sunday was launched in 1982...
published reports that the BBC had made a documentary revealing the discovery of what might be a vital ‘missing link’ in human evolution, giving an outline of the study and its intended publication date as well as a brief statement from Gingerich. On 15 May the Wall Street Journal carried a report with interviews with Gingerich and with Tim White
Tim White (anthropologist)
Tim D. White is an American Paleoanthropologist and Professor of Integrative Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is most famous for his work on Lucy as Australopithecus afarensis with discoverer Donald Johanson.-Career:White was born in Los Angeles County, California...
, who cautioned that "Lemur advocates will be delighted, but tarsier advocates will be underwhelmed". At about the same time a press release headed "World Renowned Scientists Reveal a Revolutionary Scientific Find That Will Change Everything" announced that the find was "lauded as the most significant scientific discovery of recent times."
On May 19, 2009, the team revealed their findings to the world at a press conference, simultaneously with online publication of the paper in PLoS ONE (for naming purposes, the paper was officially published in print on May 21, 2009). The paper included a statement that the authors were not advocating the possibility that the species could be ancestral to later anthropoid primates; Professor John Fleagle, of Stony Brook University in New York state, asserted that he was one of the anonymous scientific reviewers of the paper, and that he had explicitly requested before publication that the authors tone down their original claims that the fossil was on the human evolutionary line. At the press conference, the fossil was described as the "missing link" in human evolution. Hurum said that “This fossil rewrites our understanding of the evolution of primates... It will probably be pictured in all the textbooks for the next 100 years," and compared its importance to the Mona Lisa
Mona Lisa
Mona Lisa is a portrait by the Italian artist Leonardo da Vinci. It is a painting in oil on a poplar panel, completed circa 1503–1519...
. He also said that Darwinius was "the closest thing we can get to a direct ancestor" and that finding it was "a dream come true". Team member Jens Franzen said the state of preservation was "like the Eighth Wonder of the World", with information "palaeontologists can normally only dream of", but while he said it bore "a close resemblance to ourselves" in some aspects, other features indicated that it was not a direct ancestor.
Independent experts were quick to question the claims. Henry Gee
Henry Gee
Dr Henry Gee is a British paleontologist, and evolutionary biologist. He is a senior editor of Nature, the scientific journal....
, a senior editor at Nature
Nature (journal)
Nature, first published on 4 November 1869, is ranked the world's most cited interdisciplinary scientific journal by the Science Edition of the 2010 Journal Citation Reports...
, said the term "missing link" was misleading and that the scientific community would need to evaluate its significance, which was unlikely to match that of Homo floresiensis
Homo floresiensis
Homo floresiensis is a possible species, now extinct, in the genus Homo. The remains were discovered in 2003 on the island of Flores in Indonesia. Partial skeletons of nine individuals have been recovered, including one complete cranium...
or feathered dinosaurs. Chris Beard, curator of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History
Carnegie Museum of Natural History
Carnegie Museum of Natural History, located at 4400 Forbes Avenue in the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, was founded by the Pittsburgh-based industrialist Andrew Carnegie in 1896...
, said he "would be absolutely dumbfounded if it turns out to be a potential ancestor to humans."
Publicity and media coverage
Blogosphere
The blogosphere is made up of all blogs and their interconnections. The term implies that blogs exist together as a connected community or as a social network in which everyday authors can publish their opinions...
had picked up on his work, and seen Chinese dinosaur finds the object of bad early descriptions from blogging, Jørn Hurum decided to orchestrate launch of the fossil in a combined scientific and public event. Atlantic Productions
Atlantic Productions
Atlantic Productionsis a television production company creating programmes for broadcasters in the UK, USA and European Union, both commissions and co-productions...
, which had cooperated with Hurum on a program on the Predator X
Predator X
Predator X is a comic book character, in Marvel Comics' main shared universe. The character is an adversary of Marvel's mutant characters, including the X-Men.-History:...
, a giant pliosaur
Pliosaur
Pliosauroidea is an extinct clade of marine reptiles. Pliosauroids, also commonly known as pliosaurs, are known from the Jurassic and Cretaceous Periods. The pliosauroids were short-necked plesiosaurs with large heads and massive toothed jaws. These swimming reptiles were not dinosaurs but distant...
from Svalbard
Svalbard
Svalbard is an archipelago in the Arctic, constituting the northernmost part of Norway. It is located north of mainland Europe, midway between mainland Norway and the North Pole. The group of islands range from 74° to 81° north latitude , and from 10° to 35° east longitude. Spitsbergen is the...
, was brought in on the project in order to "take story straight to the masses in a way that would appeal to the average person, especially kids".
The press conference and paper on the fossil was accompanied by the launch of a website, the publication of a book which had already been distributed to bookstores, The Link: Uncovering Our Earliest Ancestor by Colin Tudge
Colin Tudge
Colin Tudge is a British science writer and broadcaster. A biologist by training, he is the author of numerous works on food, agriculture, genetics, and species diversity....
, and the announcement of a documentary (Uncovering Our Earliest Ancestor: The Link), made by Atlantic Productions
Atlantic Productions
Atlantic Productionsis a television production company creating programmes for broadcasters in the UK, USA and European Union, both commissions and co-productions...
in the UK, directed by Tim Walker and produced by Lucie Ridout, to be screened six days later on the History Channel (US), BBC One
BBC One
BBC One is the flagship television channel of the British Broadcasting Corporation in the United Kingdom. It was launched on 2 November 1936 as the BBC Television Service, and was the world's first regular television service with a high level of image resolution...
(UK), and various stations in Germany and Norway. The New York Daily News noted that "The unveiling of the fossil came as part of an orchestrated publicity campaign unusual for scientific discoveries".
One of the paper's co-authors, paleontologist Philip D. Gingerich
Philip D. Gingerich
Philip D. Gingerich is a Professor of Paleontology, Professor of Geological Sciences, Professor of Biology, Professor of Anthropology and Director, Museum of Paleontology at the University of Michigan. His research focus is in vertebrate paleontology, especially the Paleocene-Eocene transition and...
, expressed dissatisfaction with the media campaign, telling The Wall Street Journal
The Wall Street Journal
The Wall Street Journal is an American English-language international daily newspaper. It is published in New York City by Dow Jones & Company, a division of News Corporation, along with the Asian and European editions of the Journal....
that they had chosen to publish in PLoS ONE as "There was a TV company involved and time pressure" and they had been pushed to finish the study. "It's not how I like to do science", Gingerich concluded. In an interview, Jørn Hurum
Jørn Hurum
Jørn Harald Hurum is a Norwegian paleontologist and popularizer of science. He is a vertebrate paleontologist and holds an Associate Professor position at the Natural History Museum of the University of Oslo. He has studied dinosaurs, primitive mammals and plesiosaurs.- Media :Hurum is known as a...
said that PLoS ONE had been chosen as it was open access and the research had been funded by Norwegian taxpayers who would benefit from free access, it did not restrict the length of manuscript or number of illustrations, and "PLoS ONE is the quickest way to publish a large work in the world!"
At the time its discovery was announced in the scientific and the popular press, the fossil was characterized as the "most complete fossil primate ever discovered"; Sir David Attenborough
David Attenborough
Sir David Frederick Attenborough OM, CH, CVO, CBE, FRS, FZS, FSA is a British broadcaster and naturalist. His career as the face and voice of natural history programmes has endured for more than 50 years...
has described it as "extraordinary". Google
Google
Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program...
commemorated the unveiling with a themed logo on May 20, 2009. During a ceremony at the American Museum of Natural History
American Museum of Natural History
The American Museum of Natural History , located on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City, United States, is one of the largest and most celebrated museums in the world...
Hurum said that "This specimen is like finding the Lost Ark
Ark of the Covenant
The Ark of the Covenant , also known as the Ark of the Testimony, is a chest described in Book of Exodus as solely containing the Tablets of Stone on which the Ten Commandments were inscribed...
for archeologists" and "It is the scientific equivalent of the Holy Grail
Holy Grail
The Holy Grail is a sacred object figuring in literature and certain Christian traditions, most often identified with the dish, plate, or cup used by Jesus at the Last Supper and said to possess miraculous powers...
. This fossil will probably be the one that will be pictured in all textbooks for the next 100 years." Regarding the publicity, Matt Cartmill an anthropologist from Duke University said "The P.R. campaign on this fossil is I think more of a story than the fossil itself".
Independent experts have raised concern about publicity exaggerating the importance of the find before information was available for scrutiny. Chris Beard, curator of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History
Carnegie Museum of Natural History
Carnegie Museum of Natural History, located at 4400 Forbes Avenue in the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, was founded by the Pittsburgh-based industrialist Andrew Carnegie in 1896...
, was "awestruck" by the publicity machine but concerned that if the hype was exaggerated, it could damage the popularisation of science if the creature was not all that it was hyped up to be. Paleoanthropologist Elwyn Simons of Duke University
Duke University
Duke University is a private research university located in Durham, North Carolina, United States. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present day town of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco industrialist James B...
stated that it is a wonderful specimen but most of the information had been previously known, and paleoanthropologist Peter Brown of the University of New England
University of New England (Australia)
The University of New England is an Australian public university with approximately 18,000 higher education students. Its original and main campus is located in the city of Armidale in northern New South Wales....
said that the paper had insufficient evidence that Darwinius was ancestral to the simians. Others have also criticized claims that the fossil represents the "missing link in human evolution", arguing that there is no such thing unless evolution is visualized as a chain
Great chain of being
The great chain of being , is a Christian concept detailing a strict, religious hierarchical structure of all matter and life, believed to have been decreed by the Christian God.-Divisions:...
as there are an enormous number of missing branches
Tree of life (science)
Charles Darwin proposed that phylogeny, the evolutionary relatedness among species through time, was expressible as a metaphor he termed the Tree of Life...
, and that while the fossil is a primate, there is no evidence to suggest that its species is a direct ancestor of humans. ScienceBlogger
ScienceBlogs
ScienceBlogs is an invitation-only blog network and virtual community. It was created by Seed Media Group in 2006 to enhance the public understanding of science. , ScienceBlogs hosted 75 blogs dedicated to various fields of research. Each blog has its own theme, specialty, and author and is not...
Brian Switek questioned the sensationalist coverage of claims of ancestral relationships made before a full cladistic analysis
Cladistics
Cladistics is a method of classifying species of organisms into groups called clades, which consist of an ancestor organism and all its descendants . For example, birds, dinosaurs, crocodiles, and all descendants of their most recent common ancestor form a clade...
, and in a column in The Times
The Times
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...
he stated that a unique opportunity to communicate science had been lost, with press releases forestalling the necessary discovery and debate which should now proceed.
Hurum considered that the risk of buying the fossil had paid off, and said that "You need an icon or two in a museum to drag people in, this is our Mona Lisa and it will be our Mona Lisa for the next 100 years." He has been described as "a modern-era, media-savvy scientist with the right amounts of showmanship, populist sensibility, and disregard for the normal avenues of scientific prestige required to pull this off". The debut in "an astonishingly slick, multi-component media package" required exceptional coordination between networks, museums, producers and scientists while maintaining a level of secrecy which is hard to attain in modern circumstances. In interviews published on 27 May, Hurum stated that it was good that they had got the message out that primates were rooted deep in time, but that some of the slogans were too much and the publicity got completely out of control. He disclosed that he paid nearly $750,000 (£465,000) for the specimen, but felt it was worthwhile to make the fossil available for scientific investigation instead of it being bought by a private collector and hidden away. Others including Chris Beard were concerned that the price and publicity could lead to profiteering by amateur collectors, and make acquisition of specimens for research purposes more difficult.
TV documentary about Ida
The following TV documentary about Ida has been broadcast. The US version is available on DVD.- Uncovering Our Earliest Ancestor: The Link, BBCBBCThe British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
, UK, broadcast on 26 May 2009. - The Link, History Channel, USA, broadcast 25 May 2009.
- Terra X: Die geheime Entdeckung, broadcast multiple times on multiple German TV channels, the last time on 16 January 2011 on ZDFZDFZweites Deutsches Fernsehen , ZDF, is a public-service German television broadcaster based in Mainz . It is run as an independent non-profit institution, which was founded by the German federal states . The ZDF is financed by television licence fees called GEZ and advertising revenues...
Neo.
See also
- List of fossil primates
- List of transitional fossils
- NotharctusNotharctusNotharctus was an early primate that inhabited Europe and North America 50 million years ago. Modern lemurs evolved from primates similar to this genus....