Ida, Missing Link, in Oslo

The Norway Post, Doorway to Norway

May 21, 2009 Thursday

In New York, an international team of scientists, led by Jorn Hurum of the Natural History Museum in Oslo on Tuesday unveiled a well preserved fossil of what they claim to be "the Missing Link".

The beautifully preserved remains of a 47-million-year-old, lemur-like creature was unveiled at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, by the city's mayor. It has been named Ida, after Jorn Hurum's daughter.

Ida was discovered in the 1980s in a fossil treasure-trove called Messel Pit, near Darmstadt in Germany. For much of the intervening period, it has been in a private collection.

The investigation of the fossil's significance was led by Jorn Hurum, who said to BBC that the fossil creature was "the closest thing we can get to a direct ancestor" and described the discovery as "a dream come true".

He said the team concluded that she was not simply another lemur, but a new species. They have called her Darwinius masillae, to celebrate her place of origin and the bicentenary of the birth of Charles Darwin...

But Dr Hurum believes that the missing link is exactly what Ida is.

He told BBC News that the key to proving this lay in the detail of the foot. The shape of a bone in the foot called the talus looks "almost anthropoid".

The fossil will now be put on display at the Natural History Museum in Oslo. NOK 2.2 million has been granted to upgrade security at the museum, NRK reports.

(NRK/BBC)
Rolleiv Solholm

Read more of this article at... http://www.norwaypost.no/

Read more about the UNESCO world heritage site of Germany's "Grube Messel" or Messel Pit at... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messel_Pit

Note: Anyone read "Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body" by Neil Shubin? Then you'd really have perked up at not just the mention of "missing link" but also the detail of the "foot" on this fossil in particular...if you're in the Yahoo Book Group in Stavanger then you would of read this book for the 200th Anniv. of Darwin's birth & about 150 yrs since the publication of his famous theory & you'd understand more about the why & how fossils tell us so much more about ourselves than you'd ever imagine...even better this one is in our own backyard nearly, to Stavanger, just over in Oslo--Road Trip?!