With the help of some carefully chosen words to the Daily Mail and a belated “Oops, I’ve said too much” to the Wall Street Journal, a team of researchers and public relations virtuosos have attracted extraordinary attention to a primate find.

Philip Gingerich, the Director of the University of Michigan’s Museum of Paleontology and Jørn Hurum of the University of Oslo will reportedly publish a peer-reviewed article about a new primate skeleton found in Germany with the Public Library of Science tomorrow. The timing coincides with the opening of a related exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History in New York hosted by Mayor Michael Bloomberg and a BBC documentary hosted by Sir David Attenborough, according to the Wall Street Journal and Daily Mail articles.

The skeleton may be a species of adapid dating back 47 million years, according to the Wall Street Journal article. Adapids are thought to be ancestral to strepsirrhines, the group of primates that includes lemurs today. But because the adapid skeleton is missing certain lemur-like features, such as teeth and claws specialized for grooming, the pair told the Daily Mail that this particular species has more in common with happlorrhines, which are thought to predate modern tarsiers, monkeys, apes and human species.

The anonymous author of A Primate of Modern Aspect writes that “Absence of Strepsirrhine traits doesn’t a Happlorrhine make. I will have to wait for the journal article before I can say anything more on that subject.”

The Wall Street Journal reporter speculated that the finding could inflame the conflict between creationists and evolutionary biologists. But science journalism critic Charlie Petit thinks that’s unlikely. “How far back science traces our genealogy and in which direction is not germane,” to the evolution/creationism conflict, he writes on the Knight Science Journalism Tracker.

Nature will have to follow up tomorrow, after the paper is released during the press conference, since both the authors and the Public Library of Science are playing coy in advance of publication. And as Gingerich told the Daily Mail: “We have kept it under wraps because you can’t blither about something until you understand it.”