A new milestone in evolutionary biology was unveiled earlier this week that has been dubbed the "Rosetta stone" for understanding our evolutionary history - and her name is Ida.

From the article in the Guardian:

One reason Ida is so special is her exquisite preservation, and that is because the Messel pit, near Darmstadt in Germany, is a very exceptional place. Forty-seven million years ago it was a volcanic lake surrounded by a steamy sub-tropical forest. Because of the unique conditions there, Messel – which is now designated a Unesco world heritage site – has yielded countless fabulous fossils including bats, pygmy horses, crocodiles and even insects with the colours on their wings still visible.

People who study fossils are nearly always studying the hard parts: the shells and the bones. They have to deduce from the shape of each bone what the muscles were like. From that they can deduce more about how the animal held itself and moved. If they are lucky they can maybe make suggestions about what the internal organs were like.

With this fossil you don't have to make suggestions. Almost uniquely, we not only have the bones, but we also have the fur and the flesh. So it is not a question of deduction, it is not a question of imagination or suggestions, it is fact.

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Read the full article in the Guardian here and here.

Read the original article from PLoS here.