Word: ida
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From the beginning, Ida's unveiling has been a master class in ballyhoo. A week ago, the first breathless press releases began to arrive, portending the presentation of the now famous 47-million-year-old primate fossil from Germany: "MEDIA ALERT," the notice shouted in all caps. "WORLD-RENOWNED SCIENTISTS REVEAL A REVOLUTIONARY SCIENTIFIC FIND THAT WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING...
...History in New York City, the publication of a book, The Link: Uncovering Our Earliest Ancestor (Little, Brown), an ABC News exclusive and on May 25 a prime-time television special on the History Channel. Of the avalanche of media-related promotion, Jorn Hurum, a Norwegian paleontologist involved in Ida's discovery, told the New York Times, "Any pop band is doing the same thing." (See the top 10 scientific discoveries...
...young mammal, which would have looked like a cross between a lemur and a small monkey, is astonishingly complete. "Most of what we understand about primate evolution is pieced together from bits of teeth and jaws," says Michael Novacek, curator of paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History. Ida, by contrast, has pretty much every bone, from the skull to the tip of the tail, and they're all in place. Not only that: you can see impressions of its fur in the surrounding material, and there are even the remains of what was presumably Ida's final meal...
...fossil is so perfectly preserved because Ida probably died quickly and nonviolently; her resting place was an abandoned quarry called the Messel Pit, near Frankfurt. At the time she lived, the pit was a lake out of which poisonous volcanic gases probably belched from time to time. Likely felled by such an outburst, she tumbled into deep, oxygen-poor water where she would have been buried by sediments before she could decompose. Indeed, the Messel Pit is such a rich source of well-preserved fossils that it's been designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site. (Read about China's fossil...
...second reason the discovery is so important is its age. Ida - her scientific name is Darwinius masillae - dates to about 47 million years ago, when temperatures were warmer than they are today and when mammals underwent a burst of evolutionary diversification. In particular, that's when primates began splitting off into two branches. One became anthropoids, whose descendants are monkeys, apes and humans. The other turned into prosimians - lemurs and their kin. (See pictures of a bonobo eden...