Ida is a darling of the news right now, with a shiny new Website, an upcoming special on The History Channel, and enough coverage in the blogosphere to choke a cybernetic horse. It’s not without reason; she’s the most perfect primate fossil ever found:

Her skeleton is almost 100% complete. Around the skeleton is a shadow of the fur, and among the bones, where the intestines would have been, are the fossilised remains of her last meal. Studying all these features allows us to reconstruct her life history, the way she moved and her diet. There is no primate fossil from the Eocene from which we can learn so much – in fact, there is no primate so well preserved until we get to human burial…

There’s some concern, however, that the discovery is being oversensationalized, and even perhaps that the placement of Ida on the primate family tree is the result of less-than-diligent science.

It is, at the very least, an extremely impressive fossil, and I don’t know if a little sensationalism is a bad thing if it gets more people interested in science.