Early fossil skeleton sheds light on primate evolution

NEW YORK -- The nearly complete and remarkably preserved skeleton of a small, 47 million-year-old creature found in Germany was displayed Tuesday by scientists who said it would help illuminate the evolutionary roots of monkeys, apes and humans.

Experts praised the discovery for the level of detail it provided but said it was far from a breakthrough that would solve the puzzles of early evolution.

About the size of a small cat, the animal has four legs and a long tail. Nobody is claiming that it's a direct ancestor of monkeys and humans, but it provides a good indication of what a long-ago ancestor may have looked like, researchers said at a news conference.

In an evolutionary sense, the fossil is like an aunt from several generations ago, said Jens Franzen of the Senckenberg Research Institute in Frankfurt, Germany.

The fossil is the best preserved ever found for a primate, said Jorn Hurum, of the University of Oslo Natural History Museum, one of the scientists introducing the specimen. It's about 95 percent complete, even including fingertips with nails, and lacks only the lower portion of one leg, Hurum said. It also includes gut contents, showing the creature ate leaves and fruit in its rainforest environment.

Experts not connected with the discovery said the finding was remarkably complete because of features like stomach contents. But they questioned the conclusions of Hurum and his colleagues about how closely it is related to ancestors of monkeys and humans.

"I actually don't think it's terribly close to the common ancestral line of monkeys, apes and people," said K. Christopher Beard of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. "I would say it's about as far away as you can get from that line and still be a primate."

Rather than a long-ago aunt, "I would say it's more like a third cousin twice removed," he said. So it probably resembles ancestral creatures "only in a very peripheral way," he said.

Beard said scientists already have a fossil from China of about the same age that is widely accepted as coming from monkey-ape-human ancestral line, and it's much smaller than the new-found fossil and ate a different diet.

"They are radically different animals," he said.

John Fleagle of the State University of New York at Stony Brook said the scientists' analysis provides only "a pretty weak link" between the new creature and higher primates, called anthropoids, that includes monkeys and man.

"It doesn't really tell us much about anthropoid origins, quite frankly," Fleagle said.

Fleagle said the scientists did an "extraordinary" job of extracting detailed information from the fossil. "There's certainly a lot more information about this individual than probably any other fossil primate that's ever been recovered," he said.

The animal was a juvenile female that scientists believe died at about 9 or 10 months.

"She tells so many stories. We have just started the research on this fabulous specimen," said Hurum.

The fossil, recovered from a mine about 25 miles southeast of Frankfurt, is nicknamed Ida after Hurum's 6-year-old daughter. Its scientific name is Darwinius masillae, after Charles Darwin and the area where it was found.

The fossil was unearthed by a private collector in 1983 and remained in private hands until Hurum's museum bought it in 2007.

Ida was unveiled at New York's American Museum of Natural History, which will feature a replica cast in a new exhibit about mammals. It was promoted by a press release for the cable TV channel History that called it a "revolutionary scientific find that will change everything."

Mayor Michael Bloomberg, among the speakers at the news conference, called it an "astonishing breakthrough."

The story of the fossil find will be shown on History, which is owned by A&E Television Networks. A book also is planned.

Hurum saw nothing wrong with the heavy publicity, which preceded the publication of a paper about the fossil Tuesday in the scientific journal PLOS (Public Library of Science) One.

"That's part of getting science out to the public, to get attention. I don't think that's so wrong," Hurum said.