Some of the most celebrated fossil bones ever uncovered by science went on display Wednesday at the Field Museum, and they had nothing to do with Sue, the much-anticipated Tyrannosaurus rex fossil that will be unveiled by the museum in May.
One of the newest fossils to take up residence in the Field’s “Life Over Time” exhibit was introduced to scientific literature this month in the research journal Nature. Its debut was so spectacular that it was featured on network news shows, made the front page of most of the nation’s major newspapers and was the subject of a “Saturday Night Live” television show skit.
Called Eosimias, the fossil is that of a monkeylike primate about the size of a human thumb that lived in a rain forest populated by tiny animals 45 million years ago in China.
Northern Illinois University paleontologist Dan Gebo, whose team discovered the diminutive fossil, placed two foot bones–one from the Eosimias and one from another tiny primate–in a temporary display case that will remain at the museum through July 23.
The bones are about the size of a grain of rice and have to be viewed through a magnifying glass.
“The response was just stunning,” Gebo said of media coverage on the fossils after an article authored by Gebo and three colleagues described the creatures in the March 16 edition of Nature.
“It was on national television, the front pages of The New York Times, the Washington Post and everywhere else. Seeing jokes about it on `Saturday Night Live’ two nights later was pretty weird.
“I guess it’s the whole idea of something this tiny being a part of primate evolution and the beginnings of humans just captured people’s imaginations,” Gebo said.
While many museums around the world would have been thrilled to get the peewee primate fossils for exhibition, the Field was first in line, partially because Gebo is affiliated with the museum as a research associate.
Gebo and his wife, Marian Dagosto, a molecular biologist at Northwestern University Medical School, and two other colleagues found the bones by sifting through debris from a limestone quarry in China.
They also found remains of dozens of other miniature animals that lived in the same tropical forest 45 million years ago, including mouselike rodents, bats, tiny rabbits and a rhinoceros the size of a dog.
It is likely that the Field exhibit of the primate bones will be the only exhibit of the actual fossils ever mounted in this country. The bones eventually will be returned to China and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Gebo said.
“Somebody will make casts of them before they are returned to China,” he said, “so we will have those for future study and reference.”
