Ida brands frenzied media blitz, an expose for “The Year of Darwin.” Malcolm Ritter of the Associated Press reported, “Scientists say they’ve found a “missing link.”

 On May 10, 2009, the Daily Mail published reports that the BBC had made a documentary revealing the discovery of what might be a vital ‘missing link’ in human evolution, giving an outline of the study and its intended publication date as well as a brief statement. On 15 May the Wall Street Journal carried a report with interviews, who cautioned that “Lemur advocates will be delighted, but tarsier advocates will be underwhelmed.” Around the same time, a press release headed “World Renowned Scientists Reveal a Revolutionary Scientific Find That Will Change Everything” announced that the find was “lauded as the most significant scientific discovery of recent times.”

 On May 19, 2009, the Ida investigative team headed by Jens Franzen revealed their findings to the world at a press conference, simultaneously with online publication of the paper in PLoS ONE. At the press conference, the fossil was described as the “missing link” in human evolution, and “This fossil rewrites our understanding of the evolution of primates… It will probably be pictured in all the textbooks for the next 100 years.”

 The authors and compared its importance to the Mona Lisa. The authors also said that Darwinius was “the closest thing we can get to a direct ancestor” and that finding it was “a dream come true”. Team member Dr Jens Franzen said the state of preservation was “like the Eighth Wonder of the World”, with information “palaeontologists can normally only dream of”, but while he said it bore “a close resemblance to ourselves” in some aspects, other features indicated that it was not a direct ancestor.

 The Franzen team should have searched for a more definitive conclusion; experts were quick to counter.

 Henry Gee, a senior editor at Nature, said the term “missing link” was misleading and that the scientific community would need to evaluate its significance.

“The PR campaign on this fossil is I think more of a story than the fossil itself,” said anthropologist Matt Cartmill of Duke University in North Carolina. “It’s a very beautiful fossil, but I didn’t see anything in this paper that told me anything decisive that was new.”

 Chris Beard, curator of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, said he “would be absolutely dumbfounded if it turns out to be a potential ancestor to humans.”^[

 “It’s not a missing link, it’s not even a terribly close relative to monkeys, apes and humans, which is the point they’re trying to make,” Carnegie Museum of Natural History curator of vertebrate paleontology Chris Beard said.

Ann Gibbons in “Revolutionary’ Fossil Fails to Dazzle Paleontologists” and published in ScienceNOW noted, “Many paleontologists are unconvinced.”

 Robert Roy Britt writing “Ida Fossil Hype Went Too Far” in LiveScience noted, “Problem is, most of the coverage is done, and the public could be left with the impression that Ida is a rock-solid missing link in the human evolutionary chain.”

 Ida’s unveiling was highly scripted with some “Barnum and Bailey aspects,” said paleontologist Richard Kay of Duke University. Britt continued, “More important, it can now be said the findings may well have been significantly overstated. We won’t know for sure until further research is done. But if this event causes the public to distrust science and media, that distrust is well placed.”

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