Posted for Lucas Laursen

For a petrified primate with a broken wrist, Ida seems to get around. Last night, the History Channel premiered a 2-hour documentary about the fossil, which was unveiled last week at the American Museum of Natural History. Yesterday, Ida appeared at the Natural History Museum across the pond in London, and then spent the afternoon at the British Academy of Film and Television Arts in Picadilly, where a crowd of nearly 200 viewers gathered for an advance screening of the 1-hour British version of the film.

Jørn Hurum and Holly Smith, authors on the scientific study of the fossil which raised a media storm last week, were there, along with a handful of paleontologists from the Natural History Museum and University College London.

After the screening, the paleontologists chuckled about some of the technical errors in the documentary, including a claim that the common ancestor of modern-day lemurs and monkeys must have lived “hundreds of

millions of years ago” when in fact the common ancestor probably dates a mere fifty or sixty million years back. This version of the film, narrated by Sir David Attenborough, made a few other claims the scientists left out of the peer-reviewed PLOS One article, such as hinting that Ida belonged on the anthropoid branch of the family tree

because she lacks certain characteristics associated with the main alternative, the ancestors of modern-day prosimians such as lemurs.

“How lemur it is and how monkey it is is what we’re trying to figure out,” Philip Gingerich, another author on the study, told the cameras. That, perhaps, is the take-home message of most members of the research team, though it does not come across so clearly in the film, which made use of Matrix-like zooming shots, a relentless score, and shadowy reconstructions of the fossil’s finding to suggest that much of the figuring out has already been done. “The next stage is for the experts to obsess over the details,” says Christopher Dean of University College London.