by VorJack
You may remember a story from last year about the discovery of “Ida,” a fossilized early primate from a species that was named Darwinius masillae. You might, because the story was accompanied by an unprecedented amount of publicity: a documentary on the History channel, a book and an exhibit at the National Museum of Natural History.
The team behind Ida came under a lot of criticism for all the flash and dazzle that came with the unveiling of the fossil. Online skeptics, particularly the folks as the Skeptics Guide to the Universe, questioned the team’s assertion that Ida was a “missing link” between primates and humans.
According to a new article, the skeptics got that one right.
In an article now available online in the Journal of Human Evolution, four scientists present evidence that the 47-million-year-old Darwinius masillae is not a haplorhine primate like humans, apes and monkeys, as the 2009 research claimed.
They also note that the article on Darwinius published last year in the journal PLoS ONE ignores two decades of published research showing that similar fossils are actually strepsirrhines, the primate group that includes lemurs and lorises.
Ooops. Well, score one for the skeptics. But I’m betting that we’ll be hearing from the creationists about this one.
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8 Comments
Why? Are they going to acknowledge that it’s a 47 million year-old lemur? Probably not.
Or are they going to crow about “science” making a mistake? That’ll be rich. “These science guys said something that ended up being wrong, therefore our bronze-age religious text MUST be right!”
Actually, that is exactly what they do.
“They can’t even agree on what it is. Some of them say it’s a lemur, some of them say it’s an ape-man, but they still INSIST it evolved, and other opinions are PERSECUTED.”
It will probably go something like that.
So we are not monkey’s ????? I guess I will have to find another excuse for throwing poop.
tea, we are not strepsirrhines, or New World monkeys, we are haplorhines, or Old World monkeys. The common term “monkey” usually denotes any New World monkey or any Old World monkey that is not an ape, although this grouping is obviously useless from an evolutionary perspective.
poop !!! LOL
Old news.
Yes.
And since Evolution is a lot more like a continuous process than a pointed one, we should stop using the word “missing link”, that is hugely misleading.