Chris Beard
THE LINK: Uncovering Our Earliest Ancestor. Colin Tudge, with Josh Young. x + 262 pp. Little, Brown and Company, 2009. $25.99.
Recent events cause me to wonder whether we are in the midst of an arms race being waged by various scientists and their marketing gurus over how best to communicate results to the lay public. A case in point is the commotion over the Eocene primate skeleton known as Ida. At roughly 47 million years old, Ida is a remarkably complete specimen of a juvenile female primate from the Messel Pit, a UNESCO World Heritage site in Germany, near Frankfurt. Variously hailed as “the Holy Grail of paleontology,” “the eighth wonder of the world” and a “Rosetta stone” for reconstructing our distant ancestry, the fossil made its public debut at a gala event at the American Museum of Natural History in New York on May 19, 2009. A press conference at the museum coincided precisely with the online publication of a technical paper describing the fossil in the journal PLoS One. By the time the press conference had ended, a glitzy Web site promoting the fossil had gone live, a television documentary was being advertised on the History Channel, and thousands of copies of The Link, a book describing the discovery, had been distributed to retail outlets worldwide.
The fossil Ida is paradoxical on several levels, and so is this book. Perhaps the most perplexing question is why any paleontologist fortunate enough to acquire such a fossil—which some have likened to the Mona Lisa and the Lost Ark—would refrain from writing his own book about it, opting instead to farm the project out to professional writers Colin Tudge and Josh Young. Back in 1981 Donald Johanson coauthored what still stands as the definitive book in this genre, Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind. During that bygone era before the Internet abbreviated our collective attention span, Johanson and his colleagues could afford to let precious years elapse between the publication of their initial technical analyses and the popular book. Apparently time was of the essence in writing and publishing The Link.
In many ways, this book stands as further testimony to the old adage that haste makes waste. It is riddled with errors. These range from the relatively trivial but geographically challenged claim that the monkey-eating eagle Pithecophaga jefferyi inhabits South America (these majestic birds are actually confined to the Philippines) to the more fundamental but no less mistaken contention that “Ida herself is the only nearly complete fossil primate ever found.” The latter assertion would no doubt surprise the legendary comparative anatomist William King Gregory, who described exquisitely complete skeletons of the closely related and equally ancient primate Notharctus in 1920. Much closer to us in terms of time and evolutionary position is the late Miocene ape Oreopithecus bambolii, which is also documented by a relatively complete skeleton, even if it—like Ida—is nearly two-dimensional.
The Link begins by painting a highly anthropomorphized portrait of Ida as a “petite being” no more than “two feet tall” bearing “opposable thumbs.” This depiction is intended to heighten the drama of poor Ida’s untimely demise (she was less than a year old). I doubt that many of us would describe our house cats as petite beings that stand two feet tall. Yet in terms of Ida’s general posture and brain size, she was clearly more catlike than humanlike. The exact circumstances surrounding Ida’s death approximately 47 million years ago remain unknown. The vivid speculative account provided in The Link agrees with what we know about the geologic history of the ancient lake that would later become the Messel oil shale pit: Magma from beneath the lake probably leaked carbon dioxide into the water, and Ida may have been killed by a cloud of carbon dioxide gas rising from the lake.
Ida’s fossilized remains came into the possession of Jørn Hurum, a paleontologist based at the Natural History Museum at the University of Oslo in Norway, through a circuitous path. The specimen was allegedly unearthed sometime in 1982 by an unidentified private collector. Whoever found Ida did so by splitting apart chunks of the Messel oil shale. This process typically divides fossils into a “part” and a “counterpart,” each of which contains a fraction of the original skeleton. The less photogenic slab was spruced up to make it appear more complete than it really was; it was then sold to a private museum in Wyoming. Its complement, containing most of Ida’s skeleton, was kept in a private collection until Hurum learned about it at a “fossil fair” in Hamburg, Germany, in 2006 and arranged for the University of Oslo to purchase it.
These commercial transactions expose the seedy underbelly of paleontology. Many academic paleontologists, myself included, disapprove of treating fossils like commodities. Paying large sums of money for fossils inevitably encourages nonscientific collecting. All too often, this results in the permanent loss of critical data, including information on the fossil’s exact age, its depositional context, associated fauna and flora, and so forth. Equally important, when academic paleontologists have to compete with collectors whose sole motivation is a financial incentive, the academics often lose access to important fossils or entire fossil sites. Among the most disheartening effects of the media campaign surrounding Ida is the widespread knowledge that extraordinary fossil primates can command a substantial premium on the open market.
The bulk of The Link is devoted to fleshing out Ida’s fossilized remains. To do so, Hurum assembled what he has referred to as a “dream team” of paleontologists. Their analyses suggest that Ida was a vegetarian (her stomach contents indicate that her last meal consisted of fruit and leaves), that she moved about her arboreal domain by making acrobatic leaps from tree to tree, and that she was already injured when she died. They interpret Ida as belonging to a new genus and species of adapiform primate, Darwinius masillae (awkwardly, this name never actually appears in the book, which was written and printed prior to the online technical publication in which the taxon was formally proposed).
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Read more here/Leia mais aqui.
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NOTA IMPERTINENTE DESTE BLOGGER:
Eu tenho um amigo cientista que afirmou certa vez: "A cada seis meses, os paleoantropólogos anunciam a descoberta de mais um elo de transição evolutiva". Eu acho que ele tem razão. Depois do fiasco de Ida, eles anunciaram Ardi que, para mim, segundo a Lei de Standish (nome deste meu amigo cientista), será demovida do seu pedestal darwianiano de elos transitivos.
Quem viver, verá!!!
