A paper published May 19 in PLoS ONE has the blogosphere in a frenzy over a 47 million-year-old primate fossil unearthed in Germany that might be the ancestor of all modern day humans, monkeys and apes. Scientists discovered the fossil—they're calling it Ida—in 1983, but only recently has it been restored. Ida was once a lemur-like animal and belongs to a newly classified genus and species, Darwinius masillae. The most intact primate fossil discovered to date, the find will have particular meaning to evolutionary biologists who have long searched for a "missing link," though ScienceBlogger John Wilkins cautions, "it is not the missing link...it is one of potentially millions of missing nodes of the evolutionary tree."
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