David Knowles Writer
AOL News
(March 5) --Touted as "the missing link" between humans and early primates, a 47-million-year-old fossil turns out to have no such connection, a newly released study says. The debate, however, seems far from over, and it illuminates the often tricky relationship between science and the media.
Last spring, when Norwegian paleontologist Jorn Hurum and his colleagues announced the unveiling of "Ida," an unusually complete prehistoric primate fossil, it was portrayed in newspaper and television reports as a blockbuster discovery nothing short of an "eighth wonder of the world" that would offer a look at one of mankind's earliest evolutionary ancestors.
No small part of that excitement was due to Hurum himself, who had provided media outlets with a teasing press release ahead of the official announcement at New York's American Museum of Natural History that heralded the fossil as "a revolutionary scientific find that will change everything."
Some scientists doubt that this fossil, dubbed Ida, is from an early ancestor of humans, as paleontologist Jorn Hurum contends.
The hype surrounding Darwinius masillae, the scientific name given to Ida, preceded the publication of Hurum's research in a peer-reviewed journal. "Normally, you have the paper first, lots of scrutiny by other scientists and then the media enters the picture," Blythe Williams, a visiting professor of paleontology at Duke University, told AOL News.
Williams and three colleagues, writing in a paper published this week in the Journal of Human Evolution,
found no evidence that Ida represents a missing link.http://www.aolnews.com/science/article/ ... y/19383401
