Scientists revealed what could be the "missing link" in human evolution today.
Her name is Ida, and she is 47-million years old. While her skeleton looks closer to that of a lemur than a person's, but she is unlike any other primate-family fossil ever discovered. She had a long tail and was covered with fur, but she had a talus bone in her feet (like a person's) and she had nails, not claws. Unlike lemurs, she doesn't have a "grooming claw" on her feet, nor does she have a fused tooth on her lower jaw. At only 3 feet long, she has short arms and legs. She also had forward facing eyes like a person, giving her 3D vision and depth perception.
Unlike other ancient human fossils, Ida was recovered from a mile-wide crater in Germany. Her bones were first dug up in 1983. The people who excavated her divided her bones into two sets, fabricated the rest of the skeleton and sold the pieces separately. One part ended up in Wyoming, where Jens L. Frazen recognized the fraud. Rejoined with her original bones, Ida has been in the University of Oslo Natural History for the last two years. 95% complete, she is the most complete ancient human relative ever found.
The only part of my Anthropology 101 class that I didn't hate was the unit about evolution and the "missing link." I've always found the subject fascinating. I wish they'd talked about this discovery in that class. It would have been way more interesting.
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