Posted on behalf of Lizzie Buchen

Six weeks ago, a 47-million-year-old, beautifully-preserved primate fossil named Ida swamped headlines in a media blitz, generating harsh criticism of the scientists’ publicizing strategies and the lemming-like media.

But before Ida’s fame tumbles too far, a new primate’s fossils are swooping in to ride in her media wake. And though the remains are no more than jaws and a handful of teeth, they’re bent on trumping the notorious Ida’s perch on our primate tree.

The press release and its news article descendents portray the 38-million-year-old primate, called Ganlea megacanina, as Ida’s “rival” and challenger. And though the study’s lead author, Chris Beard at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, was one of the most outspoken critics of Ida’s hyperbolic publicity, he didn’t seem to mind presenting his Ganlea as a foil, stating that “[Ganlea’s] anatomy is far more compelling for it to be the ancestor of monkeys, apes and humans than it is for Ida to be the ancestor.”

Duelling fossils aside, the paper’s real scientific contribution is an improved understanding of how the extinct group of primates that includes Ganlea, called amphipithecids, fits into the primate lineage.

Over the past few decades, amphipithecid fossils have been unearthed in Myanmar and a few other Asian locales. There’s been some controversy over whether to classify them as anthropoids (which include monkeys and apes) or as adapiforms (which include extinct lemur-like primates, such as Ida).

Beard analyzed the fossilized mouth bits of 10 to 15 Ganlea individuals, all uncovered within the past few years, and concluded that the primate probably ate seeds, a diet that came about after anthropoids split from the lemur-like primates. This suggests that it and the other amphipithecids are anthropoids, not adapiforms.

In the press, but not in the paper, Beard extends this conclusion to suggest that Ganlea may belong to the ultimate ancestral group of monkeys and apes, indicating that our common ancestors originated in Asia, not in Africa as many believe. But according to paleontology writer Brian Switek, writing in his blog Laelaps, Ganlea is “likely more closely related to us than Darwinius (‘Ida’), but if the analysis of Beard et al. is correct then it is far too specialized to be considered the common ancestor of anthropoid primates.”