The money spent on Ida – the starting price was $1 million – was that spent purely on the fact that it was an exceptionally preserved primate, or did it have something to do with its potential evolutionary relationship to humans?
No. We started off thinking it was the ancestor of all lemurs. It may still turn out to be a lemur. Do you still have an open mind about that? Of course, this is science. The discussions will go for a long time. And if other people’s arguments are better than what we present here or what we are going to do in the next two papers, we will accept it, no problem. There has been strong criticism for the way this paper has been publicised. Are people upset because the paper’s conclusion – that this fossil is probably the ancestor of all apes and monkeys – seemed too set in stone? Yes. That’s why there has been head-banging. Does that make you regret the way it was done? Would you do it the same again? It would be hard to do this again; you need a really good fossil to make this kind of a splash. You can’t do this sort of thing with something that is mediocre. Would it be as interesting if it turns out to be a lemur? Yes, because you can focus on it being a primate that lived 47 million year
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