ON May 30th, New Scientist had the following to say about Ida:
“It’s a shame when the demands of the media overshadow those of science. The closely managed razzmatazz that accompanied the debut of Ida – the fossil ‘that could change everything’ about our ancestry – ensured that everyone was talking about her for a day or two. But it also meant that no one was allowed to see the relevant paper until after the event, so there was little chance to seek disinterested comment on the researchers’ claim. By the time doubts about Ida’s role in our past emerged, the circus had moved on.”

Three days prior, on May 27th, in a Q&A with Jørn Hurum, the Norwegian Palaeontologist behind Ida, Rowan Hooper and Colin Barras asked whether he was “happy with the amount of editorial control that the History Channel had over the documentary” to which he replied:

“Some of the slogans were too much. ‘The biggest find in 47 million years . . . this will change everything.’ It got completely out of control, but with the press conference it was out. We had some control over the press material but then it evolved. It grew too large to be able to control everything.”

The day before, Brian Switek, writing in the Times Online, gave a very brief history of Ida’s “fizzing bomb” on the world stage, invoking the warning of T.H. Huxley’s 1870 warning to the Geological Society of London that “the mere discovery of [a fossilized semblance] does not, in itself, prove that evolution took place by and through it.” Switek wrote about Ida:

“Over the past two years they have worked with Atlantic Productions to launch a media blitz heralding Ida as one of our early relatives. With a scientific description in the journal PLoS One, a book, two documentaries, a website and even a Twitter feed prepared beforehand, Ida burst onto the scene as the ‘holy grail’ of evolution, the ‘ancestor of us all.’ Ida is undoubtedly a spectacular fossil. A nearly complete fossil primate, with a body outline and stomach contents, she is the sort of discovery palaeontologists dream about. It may come as a surprise, then, that Ida does not change everything we thought we knew about human evolution. Indeed, she may tell us more about the origins of lemurs than our own species.”

Six days earlier on May 20th, Robert Roy Britt of LiveScience.com, went so far as to say “[no one] needs a media machine (or the mayor of New York) to fabricate a cool-factor and distort the truth.”

All this for a dead fossil, christened ‘Darwinius massillae’, in honour of 200th birth anniversary of the dead father of Evolutionary Theory, Charles Robert Darwin. What has gotten into such intelligent men that they would insist on making life out to be so blindly aimless that they make monkeys of themselves?

The paper on Ida (2009 Complete Primate Skeleton from the Middle Eocene of Messel in Germany: Morphology and Paleobiology. PLoS ONE 4(5): e5723. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0005723) itself discloses an interesting detail that has been generally overlooked.

Ida was discovered in 1983 at the foot of The Turtle Hill in Germany. It lay between right (Plate A) and left (Plate B) bedding planes of oil shale. The following is a direct quote from the paper within the “History of the Specimen” section:

“Plate B, originally described by J.L. Franzen as the sixth Messel primate, had a curious history. It was purchased in 1991 by Dr. Burghard Pohl for the Wyoming Dinosaur Center at Thermopolis, Wyoming. This plate holds a partial skeleton viewed from the left side, embedded in a plate of polyester. Franzen showed that some of the specimen is real, while substantial parts were faked to give an illusion of greater completeness.

Working from what was available, Franzen attributed the specimen to the species “Pronycticebus neglectus” (THALMANN, HAUBOLD & MARTIN, 1989) described from Geiseltal. He first placed the species in Caenopithecus, and then assigned it to a new genus Godinotia.

Plate A, described here, became available for sale and was purchased in 2007 by the Natural History Museum of the University of Oslo (Norway). This plate, showing a skeleton from the right side, proves to be the hitherto unknown and much more complete counterpart of the Wyoming Plate B. Careful study and comparison of the new and more complete plate indicates that the specimen cannot belong to Godinotia neglectus.

The Oslo specimen, plate A, clarifies exactly which parts of plate B were faked, including notably, hands and feet (where some proportions of constructions may have been based on reversed photos of A) and the tail vertebral column. Traces on the surrounding polyester resin background suggest that a cast of the tail of another mammal was inserted into plate B. Additional parts such as the vertebrae between sections 1 and 2 as well the nasal part of the skull on plate B were simply fabricated.”

In the paper itself, admitted by the very authors! And this is not the first instance of forced alignment of fossils with pet theories and such guesswork. I have found it pervades the so-called science. They admit it openly. They do not hide it. Somehow, by the time their guesswork reaches the school system, however, it acquires the status of fact.

In this, they are heading the way of Roman Catholicism which in the beginning was so anxious to establish pet dogmas that it deliberately spread all kinds of spurious tales. For this, it paid dearly in the French Revolution. Even so, evolutionary biologists are going to face the same brutal end when they are suddenly confronted by the religious backlash and can’t hold up their crumbling pile of cards.
MARK A.C. BLAIR