:: Shekhar Bhatia

Remains of the past

Shekhar Bhatia

May.29 : This has all the elements of an Indiana Jones thriller: a fossil hunter, a discovery of immense scientific significance, a mysterious middleman and an anonymous collector. There is even a smoky vodka bar where a deal is struck. It’s a fascinating story of a fossil called Ida that is being hailed as the "Mona Lisa" of fossils, "the Holy Grail of palaeontology".

From published accounts, the story goes back to 1983 when an amateur fossil hunter stumbled upon a fossil in a quarry near Frankfurt. It was a perfectly preserved, complete fossil of a young female mammal; even the outline of its fur could be seen. Complete fossils are quite rare. Scientists normally put two and two together by looking at pieces like a skull or a tooth.

Messel Pit, the place where it was found, is a goldmine for fossils. Millions of years ago it was a volcanic lake into which animals would fall and die and get buried in the sediment. United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco) has declared it a world heritage site because "it provides unique information about the early stages of the evolution".

The hunter showed his find to a private collector who took one look at it and realised it was something big, and bought it. Like all serious collectors of rare things, he did not talk about his possessions. There were rumours of a "well-preserved primate fossil", but no one knew for sure and the hunter and the collector did not talk about it for 20 years.

Two years ago, the collector decided to sell the fossil and approached a dealer who met Dr Jorn Hurum, a paleontologist at the University of Oslo Natural History Museum, in a Hamburg bar. The dealer showed him some photographs of the find and quoted a price of a million dollars. Hurum told the Guardian later that he knew the dealer was sitting on a sensational find and persuaded his museum to buy the three-feet-long fossil.

Hurum named it Ida (scientific name Darwinius masillae in honour of Charles Darwin) after his six-year-old daughter. He put together an international team of scientists. After two years of research in total secrecy, they published their findings in the Public Library of Science, an online journal.

The skeleton is 47 million years old. It is the "most complete fossil of the primate group of animals ever discovered". Almost every inch of the skeleton is intact. An excited Hurum described it as "the first link to all humans… the closest thing we can get to a direct ancestor" But scientists later said his claim was not properly backed in science.

To get an idea of the time frame, let’s look at our evolutionary ancestry. Humans started to evolve differently from chimps six million years ago. Go further back and the larger family of apes (to which we belong) split from monkeys 25 million years ago. Ida dates back to 47 million years, which makes her a direct ancestor of not just humans but apes and monkeys as well.

So what does this fossil mean to our understanding of human evolution? Is she really what they call "the Missing Link?" Scientists avoid the term "Missing Link". That, they say, implies that there is only one missing piece in the entire jigsaw puzzle of evolution. Or only one species existed at a particular time in the evolution chain. The fact is there were many species at any given time. Scientists prefer the term "transitional fossils". Every fossil is some sort of a link; every discovery adds to our understanding of evolutionary transitions.

In terms of significance, Ida is a remarkably well-preserved specimen of an early primate — so well preserved that scientists were able to determine the contents of her last meal: fruits and leaves, in case you are interested.

As for where she fits in our lineage, I have read two opposing views. Those who researched and presented Ida to the world say she is part of our lineage. The other view is that she belongs to a parallel family tree of small monkeys like lemurs and their kin who branched off separately about 60 million years ago. Palaeontologists say she has features from both branches. The jury is still out on this, but either way Ida is a significant find.

That is the science part of the story. Now comes the PR.

Hurum the scientist, it seems, is quite media savvy. The announcement of the find from Olso coincided with an unprecedented launch at the American Museum of Natural History in New York in presence of Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Ida the documentary, narrated by no less than the legendary David Attenborough, has been aired on BBC. He is clearly excited about the find and was quoted as saying, "The link until now was missing. Well, it is no longer missing". A book authored by science journalist Colin Tudge, The Link: Uncovering Our Earliest Ancestor, is out in the market. And there’s an elaborate website. Such was the "Missing Link" hype that for a day Google changed its search homepage to the image of the fossil.

When the New York Times asked Hurum about the hype, he said, "Any pop band is doing the same thing… Any athlete is doing the same thing. We have to start thinking the same way in science". Apart from the term "Missing Link", there is one more thing that scientists do not like: they abhor excessive hype about a serious scientific discovery or invention. They do not like to overstate their research. In the case of Ida, they do not like the hoopla.

But the Ida show also raises an interesting question: Is this the best way of popularising science? Is it possible to find common ground between substance and hype? Take the new Dan Brown movie, Angels and Demons, whose plot revolves around a theory that is quite far-fetched and not possible in science. But instead of ridiculing the movie as stupid, scientists at CERN are using the hype to their advantage. They have set up a website explaining why the plot is flawed in terms of science, and grabbed the opportunity to explain their work.

The difference between the two cases is that in the first the hype is about science itself, while in the second, science is taking advantage of the hype.

Shekhar Bhatia can be contacted at shekhar.bhatia@gmail.com