Darwin’s birthday present

The appearance this week of Ida, our lemur-like, 47-million-year-old ancestor, is a bright spot in an otherwise troubled world. Ida is being hailed as the original embryonic primate from which today’s great array of monkeys, apes and ultimately human beings sprang. Ida was six months old when she died and has been perfectly preserved in the Messel pit near Darmstadt in Germany, her baby teeth intact, her last vegetarian meal still in her stomach. Is Ida the ‘missing link’? Well, that’s an overused and largely meaningless phrase (every link found of course creates another two ‘missing’) but Darwinius masillae (Ida’s real name) will certainly prove a problem for creationists who claim that the ‘gap’ in the fossil record proves God placed man on earth complete in his current form. And if nothing else, she’s certainly the perfect present for Darwin, in the year of his 200th birthday, and on the 150th anniversary of the publication of his Origin of Species.