The explosion created a type of volcanic lake known as a maar. The pressure of the steam caused a massive explosion as it tore into the earth. When the magma hit the water table, it instantly turned to steam. The pit was formed millions of years ago when hot magma bubbling from under the earth came too close to the underground water table. The Messel Pit is an abandoned quarry about 35 kilometers (22 miles) southeast of Frankfurt, Germany, near the village of Messel. The species name, masillae, commemorates the Messel Pit in Germany, where Ida was found. The genus Darwinius was named in honor of Charles Darwin's 200th birthday. Darwinius masillae Ida's scientific name is Darwinius masillae. They decided to name the fossil after her. Developmentally, she was about the same age as Hurum’s daughter, Ida, who was also losing her baby teeth. From this evidence, the paleontologists determined Ida was a juvenile primate-not a baby, but not fully adult, either. Unerupted molars-adult teeth that were pushing out her baby teeth-could still be seen in her jaw.
When the scientists looked closer, they discovered Ida was in the process of losing her baby teeth. One of the discoveries Hurum and other paleontologists made when they x-rayed Ida was that she had many more teeth than the average primate. The identity of the person who dug up Ida remains unknown. The main part (“Slab A”) remained with the collector, while the other part ("Slab B") was sold to the Wyoming Dinosaur Center in Thermopolis, Wyoming, in the United States. Until 2000, Ida's remains were split into two pieces. A private collector discovered Ida near Messel, Germany, in 1983. Hurum persuaded the museum to purchase Ida. Jørn Hurum, a paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in Oslo, Norway. The scientific team that introduced Ida to the world was led by Dr. Rounded fingertips with nails are classic primate features. Her hands show she had rounded fingertips with nails, not claws. Ida had long fingers and toes and opposable thumbs. Her last meal- fruit-was still preserved in her gut millions of years after she ate it. However, scientists didn’t have to guess what she ate. The shape of Ida’s teeth suggests she was a vegetarian. Nocturnal animals are active mainly at night. Ida had large eye sockets, which suggest she was nocturnal. She didn’t die of a broken wrist, but it almost certainly contributed to her early death. Ida’s remains also show she had a broken right wrist.
Ida's legs were longer than her arms, indicating she was a le aper. Her body is 24 centimeters (nine inches) long. From end to end she is only 58 centimeters (23 inches) long, about the size of a small house cat. Ida was a small primate, about nine months old when she died. By comparison, the famous “ Lucy” fossil, from the species Australopithecus afarensis, is only 40 percent complete. Ninety-five percent complete, she is the most complete primate fossil ever found. Paleontologists, scientists who study fossils, estimate that Ida died 47 million years ago. They don’t even have to be fossils: many living lineages have transitional features.ĭarwin’s 1859 prediction that transitional forms would be found was quickly confirmed.Ida (pronounced EE-duh) is the most perfectly preserved primate fossil in the world. It merely needs to record aspects of evolutionary change that occurred as one lineage split from another. A transitional form does not need to be a perfect halfway house directly linking one group of organisms to another. Similarly, corals and sponges did not vanish when more advanced lineages of worms branched out 600 million years ago.įor this reason the concept of “missing link” is a misleading one. For example, apes and humans split from a common ancestor 7 million years ago and both lineages are still around. Life does not progress up a hierarchical ladder from “low” to “high” but is a branching bush with numerous lineages splitting apart and coexisting simultaneously. At the time, such fossils were conceived as “missing links” in the “great chain of being” from lowly corals through higher organisms such as birds and mammals to humans (and ultimately to God). What Darwin was bemoaning was the lack of “transitional” fossils – those with anatomical features intermediate between two major groups of organisms. Darwin spent two chapters of his book apologising for the paucity of the fossil record, but predicted that it would eventually support his ideas. WHEN Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, there was relatively little evidence in the fossil record of evolutionary change.
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