A 47-million-year-old primate fossil that is so complete that scientists can tell what its last meal was promises to shed light on the earliest stages of evolution of the lineage that led to humans, researchers said Tuesday.
The unprecedented fossil of a lemurlike creature that probably weighed no more than 2 pounds when it was fully grown is the most complete primate specimen ever obtained.
The story of primate evolution has been pieced together mostly from fossilized skulls, jawbones and the occasional foot — leaving large gaps in anatomy for researchers to fill in with informed speculation.
“This fossil is so complete . . . it is unheard of in the primate record,” said paleontologist Jorn H. Hurum of the University of Oslo in Norway. “You have to get to a human burial to see something this complete.”
Hurum is the lead author of a paper in the online journal PLoS One as part of a massive publicity campaign. The information about the primate was revealed at a news conference at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where a replica of the fossil is on display.
A book about the find, called “The Link,” will be published today by Little Brown and Co., and a documentary of the same name will be shown on the History Channel on Monday.
Asked about the unusual amount of hype, Hurum was unrepentant. “That’s part of getting science out to the public, to get attention,” he said. “I don’t think that is so wrong.”
The fossil is promoted as a kind of “missing link” in human evolution. Researchers are more circumspect.
“It is a representative of an ancestral group giving rise of all kinds of higher primates,” Hurum said. “We are not dealing with our great-great- great-grandmother, but perhaps our great-great-great-aunt.”
The fossil was found in the Messel Shale Pit, a world-renowned fossil source southeast of Frankfurt, Germany. Formed by a volcanic eruption nearly 48 million years ago, the pit’s shale has yielded a bounty of fossils from the Eocene epoch, when that region of Germany was a tropical forest.
The fossil, formally called Darwinius masillae but nicknamed Ida, was found by amateurs in 1983. It was broken in half, and the lower portion was sold to the Wyoming Dinosaur Center. The top remained in a private collection until a few years ago, when it was sold to the Natural History Museum at the University of Oslo.
Ida’s last meal, by the way, was berries and a salad.
