The fossil nicknamed 'Ida'.
Credit: Wikimedia
IT'S AN OVERCAST MORNING in mid-2009. From my home city of Bochum in the west of Germany, I start up my little grey Peugeot 306 time machine. I adjust my 4-D GPS, ready to bend the fabric of space-time and fling me way back to the Eocene, 47 million years ago and approximately 30 km southeast of Frankfurt. The site that is today occupied by a little village called Messel.
The object of my journey is a small and strikingly preserved fossil primate known as Darwinius masillae, or more endearingly, Ida. Her Latin name honours the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species and the Messel Pit in which she was found.
Ida is the most strikingly preserved early primate fossil ever discovered, and if we can correctly attribute her position on the early family tree of primates, she will unlock many secrets about where all apes and monkeys came from.
During her life in the much warmer Eocene Epoch, Ida - who looked a little more like a lemur than a monkey - would have lived on the edge of a volcanic lake fringed with a paratropical rainforest, and buzzing with a stunning diversity of wildlife; some recognisable to us, others lost or now changed beyond recognition.
At the time, Messel was closer to modern-day Sicily and has shifted with the slow action of plate tectonics. Ida belonged to a primitive and now extinct branch of the primate family tree known as the Adapids. We know Ida was female because she lacks a baculum, or penis bone, a feature common to many male primates.
She burst onto the world scene in May 2009 and was touted by the researchers studying her as an ancient evolutionary 'missing link' to all monkeys, apes and - by extension - humans. She created a buzz in the media and blogosphere and quickly became the centre of controversy, not only over her place in the family tree, but also over the way its discoverers announced their findings.
I first set eyes on a replica fossil of this fascinating creature on a visit to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City just one day after Jørn Hurum of the Natural History Museum in Oslo, Norway, and his hand-picked team made their announcement to the world.
I read fantastic reports in various news articles: British naturalist David Attenborough had gushed "The link they would have said until now is missing … it is no longer missing." Philip Gingerich from the University of Michigan, USA, called her "a kind of Rosetta Stone," for primate evolution, while Jörg Habersetzer, from Germany's Senckenberg Museum (whom I would later meet) said "this fossil rewrites our understanding of the early evolution of primates".
The slick press conference also announced a multiple media tie-in: the launch of a book, a website and a documentary narrated by Attenborough, all promoting Ida in addition to the paper describing her in the journal Public Library of Science ONE, or PLoS ONE. The way Hurum's team analysed Ida in secrecy and then signed on media partners to promulgate their find even before allowing independent review from experts quickly attracted criticism.
Take Chris Beard, curator of vertebrate palaeontology at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh and the author of The Hunt for the Dawn Monkey. He was one of the first to express concerns about the claim that Ida sits in the same lineage of primates that led to monkeys, apes and eventually us (the 'anthropoids').
If Ida had been in this group, she would have certain "features that evolved after anthropoids split away from lemurs and other early primates. Here, alas, Ida fails miserably," he says, expressing concerns that by the time any of these doubts had been raised, the media circus had moved on.
