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Ida: The Link (2009)

by Colin Tudge(Favorite Author)

3.45 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

8251635462 (ISBN13: 9788251635462)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Schibsted

review 1: This book is about "Ida", the oldest primate fossil ever discovered. At 47 million years old, it is 43 million years older than the next oldest primate fossil, "Lucy". Ida was discovered in the 1970's in Germany, and kept privately until just a few years ago. Then it was sold for a million dollars to the Natural History Museum of Oslo, where it has been receiving considerable attention by scientists.This remarkable fossil find deserves a lot of attention, because Ida's fossil skeleton is 95% complete--an almost unheard of percentage for an ancient fossil. Even stomach contents were preserved, showing that Ida ate fruits. The creature was small, but probably stood upright and could possibly be of a species that was an ancestor to humans.The first part of the book describes ... moreIda's discovery. The last part of the book describes Ida in detail. Both of these parts are fascinating. The middle part of the book goes into details about paleontology and evolution that have little to do with Ida directly. Frankly, these details are far beyond my understanding, and probably beyond that of most readers. So, I cannot recommend this book without some reservations.
review 2: Condescendingly pedantic on about a 5th grade level of literacy--elevated from the 3rd grade only by the vocabulary necessary to the field--Tudge bores us to death for more than 2/3s of the book with a simplistic overview of those anthropology and archaeology 101 courses we took so long ago. Our author also has a bad habit of beginning sentences with 'and'--and other construction words that should remain in the middle--as well as littering his prose with an enormous amount of parens. His real sin, however, is that only 40 pages of this slim 240 page (and that is a stretch, as the font is so large and the margins so narrow that the book would barely be 180 pages) are devoted to the star of the story: Ida. Oddly enough, most of that information is contained in the few chapters written by another author (chapters that Tudge evidently didn't bother to read, judging by the amount of redundant data he spits out). Considering that this may be the single most important fossil find in history, Tudge has given us one of the epic failures in the history of science writing. less

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