Monkey Business

Since he's posted Dean Martin videos for me...here's one for Vincenzo, a 47 million year-old lemur monkey, aka "The Missing Link."



To get a glimpse of the Ida fossil, the media make monkeys of themselves
From Bloomberg to the History Channel, everybody wants a piece of the primate action

For a living thing that died in a prehistoric soup, Ida enjoyed a thoroughly modern unveiling. It, or she as it/she was called, was brought before the world's media with the razzmatazz normally reserved for serving presidents or misbehaving film stars.

It is perhaps churlish to complain about the hour and a half of rampant self-publicising that we had to endure before we finally got to meet it/her. After all, we have already been waiting some 47 million years.

And when the climax finally arrived it was truly and astonishingly uplifting. It/she was revealed behind a glass box, her frame strikingly tiny, the size of a cat, her elongated back and slinking tail curved like a new moon.

There is something vulnerable, almost plaintive, about the way her arms are held up as if in supplication. And the ability to see the remains of food inside her stomach is simply astounding.

So there was no doubting the extraordinary power of the moment.

The bit that grated was the desperate, unseemly scramble to grab some of the action. In a display that was utterly primatal, figures as varied as the mayor of New York and the higher education minister of Norway made sure they were front and centre stage.

The most sublime image was of Michael Bloomberg standing beside Ida's glass box, his arm around the shoulders of a school girl who was wearing a T-shirt with the TV tie-in logo: "The Link. This changes everything". The main thing Bloomberg was presumably hoping this would change was his prospects of winning an unprecedented third term as New York mayor in upcoming elections.

Almost on a par with Bloomberg was Tora Aasland, minister for higher education in the Norwegian government, who appeared to think Ida was a wonder of Norwegian science as opposed to a wonder of pre-historic evolution. She pledged $350,000 for the project.

Beyond the politicians, the media crowd was in full voice, each individual making more high-pitched claims about the discovery than the last. Anthony Geffen who has made a film about the secret process to bring the fossil to public attention made an allusion to the moon landings.

Nancy Dubuc of the History Channel that will be showing the film said Ida "promised to change everything that we thought we understood about the origins of human life".

The publishers Little Brown plugged their rapidly turned around and secretly produced book-of-the-film-of-the-science by saying the fossil would "undoubtedly revolutionise our understanding of our origins".

Dr Jorn Hurum, the scientist at the heart of the project, made the most exotic parallels. He screened photographs of the Mona Lisa and the Rosetta Stone, without elucidation, though the implication was clear. He variously described the fossil as the Holy Grail of paleontology and the lost ark of archeology.

She/it is of course no longer in it, but if she were one can't help suspecting that Ida would be turning in her grave.

*Link