It is hard to know whether to applaud or be appalled. Scientists, the media, and others are colluding to pretend that a missing link is the missing link
The public may hate real science but they are transfixed by fossil Ida a transitional primate between lemurs and monkeys/apes dating from 47 million years ago and discovered in Germany. You have Ida's scientific naming, Darwinius masillae, tying her to Darwin for his 200th birthday. There is Ida the book(The Link), Ida, the movie (The Link), and even talk of a People magazine cover.
I am delighted that the public is taking such an unwonted interest in primate paleontology. Paleontologists have good reason to be excited as well. Ida is the most complete fossil primate at 95% complete and also the best preserved. She is an important "missing link" between our branch of the evolutionary tree of life - the apes - and the rest of the animal kingdom.
Should the public be so excited about her discovery? Logically speaking, they should not be too interested in obscure primate systematics. Yet they are fascinated with the missing link idea and may confuse this missing link with another. They are being sold a bill of goods.
To begin with, the real missing link that most people are curious about is the - as yet undiscovered - link between chimps and humans. Notice how the distinction is being so artfully obscured by invoking the name of Darwin whose main claim to fame is the identification of apes as ancestral to humans. As to the People magazine rumor, you have to be not just a celebrity, but also human to appear on the cover.
The public interest in Ida is remarkable when you consider how far away she is on the family tree of species. In common parlance, chimps are frequently referred to as "monkeys" which is a bit like saying that Mine that Bird, winner of the Kentucky Derby, is a donkey. Joe and Joanne six pack couldn't give a tinker's cuss about primate systematics. Yet, they are eating up this example and loving it.
What modern-day P.T. Barnum is behind this extraordinary feat of scientific promotion? Much of the credit goes to Dr. JØrn Hurum a paleontologist at Oslo University's Natural History Museum. Hurum not only assembled a scientific team to study the fossil. He also named it after Darwin.
A good fossil is nothing without a catchy name. Remember Lucy. In a further flash, Hurum christened it with the common name "Ida" after his own daughter who at six years is at about the same stage of development as the fossil. Now the daughter is telling her friends that there are two Idas, the living one and the fossil. The media just love this sort of human interest story.
I don't want to sell Ida short. There really is an opportunity here to get children interested in paleontology and in evolution. Moreover, she comes with a CSI-type narrative. Her wrist had gotten broken so that she may not have been able to climb well and drink from water trapped in leaves. Forced to drink in a volcanic lake, she may have been overcome by a blast of poisonous gas that caused her to fall in the silt where she was so perfectly preserved that even her fur was visible and her last meal could be determined. Other fossils from the lake at Messel where she was found were perfectly preserved also suggesting that the place was indeed a death trap. Science teachers are going to love this stuff.
Even the story of Ida's discovery is full of intriguing wrinkles. An amateur fossil hunter made the find way back in 1983. He kept it secret for two decades before deciding to sell through a German fossil dealer named Thomas Perner. Perner agreed to buy the fossil sight unseen, taking a huge risk that paid off.
The Oslo Museum of Natural history was willing to pay a large (undisclosed) price in the vicinity of a million dollars. As Hurum expressed it "this is our Mona Lisa and it will be our Mona Lisa for the next 100 years." Given the publicity generated so far, he may well be correct. P.T. Barnum would have been proud. And there is a sucker born every minute.
