Word: scientificizing
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From the beginning, Ida's unveiling has been a master class in ballyhoo. A week ago, the first breathless press releases began to arrive, portending the presentation of the now famous 47-million-year-old primate fossil from Germany: "MEDIA ALERT," the notice shouted in all caps. "WORLD-RENOWNED SCIENTISTS...
The press releases were followed by an international press conference at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, the publication of a book, The Link: Uncovering Our Earliest Ancestor (Little, Brown), an ABC News exclusive and on May 25 a prime-time television special on the History...
This isn't exactly the stamp of approval most scientists look for, though, and in this case the puffery is especially unfortunate because the actual scientific finding, described in a paper published on May 19 in the online journal PLoS One, really is important. First, the young mammal, which would...
The second reason the discovery is so important is its age. Ida - her scientific name is Darwinius masillae - dates to about 47 million years ago, when temperatures were warmer than they are today and when mammals underwent a burst of evolutionary diversification. In particular, that's when primates began splitting...
All of which renders the press release touting a "revolutionary scientific find that will change everything" absolutely true - as long as by "everything," you mean "whether the branch of the primate family that includes monkeys, apes and humans comes from the suborder strepsirrhinae or the suborder haplorrhinae," according to the...