"You need an icon or two in a museum to drag people in," said Hurum, "this is our Mona Lisa and it will be our Mona Lisa for the next 100 years." He did not see the fossil before buying it – just three photographs, representing a huge gamble.īut it appears to have paid off.
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I was just thinking about how to get this to an official museum so that it could be described and published for science." Hurum would not reveal what the university museum paid for the fossil, but the original asking price was $1m. "My heart started beating extremely fast," said Hurum, "I knew that the dealer had a world sensation in his hands. It was Perner who approached Hurum two years ago. He kept it under wraps for over 20 years before deciding to sell it via a German fossil dealer called Thomas Perner. Ida was originally discovered by an amateur fossil hunter in the summer of 1983 at Messel pit, a world renowned fossil site near Darmstadt in Germany. She will then be transported back to Oslo, via a brief stop at the Natural History Museum in London on Tuesday, 26 May, when Attenborough will host a press conference. There is even talk of Ida being the first non-living thing to feature on the front cover of People magazine. It has been shipped across the Atlantic for an unveiling ceremony hosted by the mayor of New York Michael Bloomberg today. It's been hidden because the only specimens are so incomplete and so broken there's nothing almost to study." The fossil has been formally named Darwinius masillae in honour of Darwin's 200th birthday year. "It tells a part of our evolution that's been hidden so far. "This will be the one pictured in the textbooks for the next hundred years," said Dr Jørn Hurum, the palaeontologist from Oslo University's Natural History Museum who assembled the scientific team to study the fossil. "The more you look at Ida, the more you can see, as it were, the primate in embryo." "This little creature is going to show us our connection with the rest of all the mammals with cows and sheep, and elephants and anteaters," said Sir David Attenborough who is narrating a BBC documentary on the find. The skeleton is 95% complete and thanks to the unique location where she died, it is possible to see individual hairs covering her body and even the make-up of her final meal – a last vegetarian snack. The top-level international research team, who have studied her in secret for the past two years, believe she is the most complete and best preserved primate fossil ever uncovered.
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