REMEMBER how the lunatic fringe went bunkers over the Ida fossil? How they screamed that the evolutionary missing link is actually a “mermaid”? Well, standby for another helping of crazy religiosity as scientists announce that there is no such thing as a “missing link” and they have “Ardi” to prove it.

National Geographic magazine is reporting that Ardipithecus ramidus (nick named Ardi) is the fossil that “puts to rest the notion, popular since Darwin’s time that a chimpanzee-like missing link— resembling something between humans and today’s apes— would eventually be found at the root of the human family tree.”

The magazine says Ardi shows an “unexpected mix of advanced characteristics and of primitive traits seen in much older apes that were unlike chimps or gorillas. As such, the skeleton offers a window on what the last common ancestor of humans and living apes might have been like.”

“This find is far more important than Lucy,” said Alan Walker, a paleontologist from Pennsylvania State University who was not part of the research. “It shows that the last common ancestor with chimps didn’t look like a chimp, or a human, or some funny thing in between.”

So, probably fake pastors hoping that the missing link is a mermaid are out of luck. Readers can get more details about Ardi at National Geographic online.
JUSTIN de FREITAS