The Link: Uncovering Our Earliest Ancestor [Kindle Edition]

Colin Tudge is a very good writer, and he has a knack for making difficult material understandable. "The Link" is a passionate story about the discovery and potential significance of Ida, a 47 million year old fossil of an athropoid-like (or possibly lemur-like) animal. Although Ida's remains have been crushed as flat "as a German beer mat," the skeleton is nearly complete and the fossil imprint shows an outline of her fur and soft tissues, as well as the remains of her last meal. Nearly intact fossils of this type are extraordinarily rare, particularly from the Eocene. Tudge skillfully explains the likely circumstances of Ida's death and how her body came to be preserved at the bottom of a volcanic crater lake that eventually became the Messel Pit in modern Germany. He also skillfully and clearly explains why the world has been growing steadily cooler since the Eocene--it has to do with the "Azolla Event," the rise of the Himalayas following India's tectonic collision with Asia, and Milancovic cycles (Tudge lays out the basics in "The Link" but explores the concepts in more detail in his "Time Before History").

He also does a good job of describing the flora and fauna of the Eocene, a hothouse period in which the world was filled with many familiar animals, as well as many other that have long-since gone extinct. Unfortunately, although the book includes many photographs of Ida's fossilized remains and even a three-dimensional recreation of her skeleton, the American edition offers no artist's impressions of Ida or the animals that she shared her world with. Artist renderings would have greatly enhanced Tudge's descriptions of some very interesting beasts....

While "The Link" is generally well written, it does bog down in technical language from time to time, for example: "Next, reaching their peak in the Eocene, we have the adapiforms on the one hand and the omomyids on the other (where the omomyids are presumed to include the microchoerids)" (p. 205). Although I have often made this same point vehemently--indeed, even violently--at cocktail parties, I must admit that this observation looks surprisingly dry now that I see it in print. Read more ›

This is basically a well-written and exciting book about one of the most eye-catching fossils unearthed in a long time.
The Messel Pit, outside Frankfurt in Germany, has yielded a lot of very finely preserved fossils from the Eocene, one of the earlier epochs of the mammals' rule. One of these fossils is the topic of this book, an early primate, preserved in exquisite detail.
The book starts out with the story of how the specimen turned up at a fossil fair in Hamburg and eventually was acquired by a Norwegian university professor, who named it Ida. This chapter tends to go into detailed descriptions of a number of less-known paleontologists, including the size and colour of their beards. Such human-interest material often plagues paleontology books meant for a wider readership, apparently out of fear that the topic of the book is not interesting enough in itself.
Fortunately, "The Link" quickly moves on to the real stuff, a fascinating description of the Messel Pit, prehistory, geology and old fauna and flora. In the following chapters we look at the development of primates since the departure of the dinosaurs.
Gradually, the book warms up to its main theory; that Ida actually is one of our direct ancestors. The reasons given seem flimsy, but maybe the real thinking would be too complicated for the layman. However, the impression left behind is that this is maybe a shade too forced a conclusion, and it has also subsequently been hotly disputed in the scientific world.
And frankly, pushing the idea of human ancestry seems somehow superfluous. Ida is spectacular enough on her own, and well deserves this nice book with all the sharp photographs of her flattened remains.