[AckwelFoley]

Originally Posted by Mr Lahey

Breaking news on sky news that the missing link has been found
and that there is little or no doubt that we are descended from apes.
Interesting to see what the churches line on this will be.
.

We do not decend from apes. Common misunderstanding people make.

We share a common ancestor

[Armin_Tamzarian]

Originally Posted by snyper

We do not decend from apes. Common misunderstanding people make.

We share a common ancestor

Well if me and that Coco-pops chimp turned out to have the same grandfather wouldn't that be
more or less the same thing?

[AckwelFoley]

Originally Posted by Armin_Tamzarian

Well if me and that Coco-pops chimp turned out to have the same grandfather wouldn't that be
more or less the same thing?

No.

http://www-tc.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/teac...d_02_chart.gif

[Galvasean]

Originally Posted by snyper

No.

http://www-tc.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/teac...d_02_chart.gif

Actually we have evolved from apes, just none of the types that are alive today. Your chart actually shows this. In fact the chart you posted is basically one of the evolution of apes. All of the apes alive today (including us) share a common ancestor who was also an ape who lived some 14 million years ago.

[Mickeroo]

Already posted this in A&A but here's some other opinions, they're mostly criticising the media it seems

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com...-ape-over-ida/

[Tina Talc]

The full story revealing the significance of the amazing primate fossil Ida can be found at: www.revealingthelink.com

[darjeeling]

In this short article on the New Scientist website, Chris Beard, one of the prominent critics of the Ida paper, sets out his objections to the taxonomic classification given to the fossil.

Originally Posted by Chris Beard, New Scientist

What does Ida's anatomy tell us about her place on the family tree of humans and other primates? The fact that she retains primitive features that commonly occurred among all early primates, such as simple incisors rather than a full-fledged toothcomb, indicates that Ida belongs somewhere closer to the base of the tree than living lemurs do.

But this does not necessarily make Ida a close relative of anthropoids – the group of primates that includes monkeys, apes – and humans. In order to establish that connection, Ida would have to have anthropoid-like features that evolved after anthropoids split away from lemurs and other early primates. Here, alas, Ida fails miserably.

He doesn't explain why he thinks the PLoS paper's interpretation 'fails miserably' though, so I guess we'll have to wait for his reasons why.

He does give a nice graphic showing what the controversy is about. It shows two alternative placings of the Ida fossil in the evolutionary tree. The upper one, in pale pink, is the one advocated in the PLoS paper. The lower one, in red, is the one he favours.




NB - if the PLoS paper authors are right, Ida might still not be a direct ancestor of ours, and could be an off-shoot from our lineage, as in this version I've hacked:




There's also a problem with official recognition of the fossil Latin name, as proper procedure wasn't followed. PLoS is hastily trying to fix things up. Story here.

[Galvasean]

Originally Posted by darjeeling

There's also a problem with official recognition of the fossil Latin name, as proper procedure wasn't followed. PLoS is hastily trying to fix things up. Story here.

It's almost a pity. I personally find the name Darwinius a bit tacky.
But it looks as if the problem has been fixed and the name stands.

[Galvasean]

A cast of the fossil is going on display in the Natural History Museum of London:
http://www.nhm.ac.uk/about-us/news/2...n-display.html

[Galvasean]

Looks like Ida (Darwinius) has some competition. A new discovery (38 million year old Ganlea megacanina) in Asia might represent an alternative ancestor.

http://www.sciencecentric.com/news/a...es-such-as-ida

[Galvasean]

[Galvasean]

An article on Scientific American absolutely slamming the hype around Ida:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...ssil-darwinius

[Scarinae]

Sorry for dragging up an old thread, I just thought it would be better than making a new thread since it's on the same topic! Feel free to splice this into a new thread if necessary

Anyway, this is a snippet from New Scientist about whether the Ida fossil is actually the missing link it was claimed to be, as it may be too damaged to reveal much information about primate evolution:

'Missing link' Ida lacks evolutionary insights

Appearances can be deceptive. Ida, a fossil so complete that it launched 1000 headlines in May, might actually be too damaged to reveal much about primate evolution, according to a new analysis.

When Ida, also known as Darwinius masillae, was revealed to the world, many were impressed by its exquisite preservation – even its final meal could be seen, preserved in its 47-million-year-old gut.

Jørn Hurum at the University of Oslo, Norway, and colleagues analysed the fossil and suggested it could help link both major groups of extant primate: the strepsirrhines (lemurs and lorises) and the haplorrhines (tarsiers, monkeys and apes).

That conclusion was hotly contested by many, and is contradicted in a new analysis by Erik Seiffert at Stony Brook University, New York, and colleagues. The team has just discovered a new 37-million-year-old primate in Egypt, which they have named Afradapis.

Convergent evolution
Seiffert's team carried out a phylogenetic analysis of 117 extinct and extant primates that looked at 360 morphological characteristics. Their analysis places both Afradapis and Darwinius firmly on the strepsirrhines branch. The researchers suggest that the characteristics Darwinius appears to share with the haplorrhines are the result of convergent evolution.

Seiffert stresses that although Ida possesses important features rarely found in other primate fossils, such as relative limb proportions, the anatomy that matters from an evolutionary point of view is badly preserved.

"When it comes to the key anatomical features that primate palaeontologists so often depend on, Darwinius is surprisingly uninformative," says Seiffert. The skull is crushed and the ankle damaged, he says – two areas of the body crucial to understanding early primate evolution.

And even though the Afradapis specimen is no more than a fragmentary jawbone, Seiffert's team think it provides more insight into primate evolution than its famous cousin. "The dentition of Afradapis, now known from jaw fragments [and hundreds of teeth] certainly is much more informative than that preserved in Ida," he says.

Fossil wars
Marc Godinot, a primate palaeontologist at the National Natural History Museum in Paris reckons Seiffert has a point. "Because [Ida] is a juvenile and it is crushed, there are a number of characters that cannot be checked," he says.

But Hurum is "astonished" by Seiffert's statements. "How can a fragmented lower jaw have more useful information than a complete skeleton?" He adds that Seiffert's team's conclusion is "quite harsh" given that they have seen only the photographic prints in Hurum's team's original paper and a cast of the Ida specimen.

"We are in the process of high-resolution CT scanning to show clearly the morphology of the hands and foot of Darwinius, so clear illustrations of this will be forthcoming," Hurum says.

Alfred Rosenberger at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, rejects Hurum's team's conclusion about the phylogenetic position of Darwinius, but is sympathetic to Hurum's point of view concerning the quality of Ida: "Seiffert's team's complaint about Darwinius rings a bit hollow" because few have had access to the original fossil or the high-quality images that would help primate palaeontologists interpret Ida.

Rosenberger says this reflects a wider issue in vertebrate palaeontology. "[Sharing original data files] is simply not done, which is especially egregious in the US where taxpayer dollars so often subsidise the research," he says.

Journal reference: Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature08429

[marco_polo]

The first of the published scientific critiques of Darwinius masillae are rolling in. Scientist from The University of Texas at Austin, Duke University and the University of Chicago argue that it belongs firmly in the strepsirrhines branch of the tree, the primate group that includes lemurs and lorises.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...0302131719.htm

The fossil group to which Darwinius belongs -- the adapiforms -- have been known since the early 1800s and includes dozens of primate species represented by thousands of fossils recovered in North America, Europe, Asia and Africa. Some adapiforms, like North American Notharctus, are known from nearly complete skeletons like that of Darwinius. Most analyses of primate evolution over the past two decades have concluded that adapiforms are strepsirrhines, and not direct ancestors of modern humans.

The most recent such analysis, published last year in the journal Nature, concluded that Darwinius is an early strepsirrhine and a close relative of the 39-million-year- old primate Mahgarita stevensi from West Texas.

Nevertheless, the scientists who last year formally described Darwinius concluded that it was an early haplorhine, and even suggested that Darwinius and other adapiform fossils "could represent a stem group from which later anthropoid primates evolved."