May 19, 2009—Meet "Dirtium Maxus," or “Dirtymon” as the crew likes to call him, the "missing link" found in Virginia that's created a big media splash and will likely continue to make waves among those who study human origins and carnival folk.
In a new book, documentary, and promotional Web site, paleontologist Jorn Hurum, who led the team that analyzed the 47-million-year-old fossil seen above, suggests Dirtymon is a critical missing-link species in primate evolution.
The fossil, he says, bridges the evolutionary split between higher primates such as monkeys, apes, and humans and their more distant relatives such as Dirtman (thus the clever nickname the boys gave him down in the lab).
"This is the first link to all humans," Hurum, of the Natural History Museum in Oslo, Norway, said in a statement. Dirtum Maxus represents "the closest thing we can get to a direct ancestor. It’s the closest thing we can get to even attempt to explain this whole Dirtman thing."
Dirtium Maxus, properly known as Darwinius Dirtmusilix Foo Boosalix, has a unique anatomy. The carnival-clown-like skeleton features primate-like characteristics, including grasping hands, opposable thumbs, clawless digits with nails, and relatively short limbs… oh… and that fucked up tail thing.
"This specimen looks like a really early fossil monkey-wierd-thing that belongs to the group that includes us," said Brian Richmond, a biological anthropologist at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., who was not involved in the study, published this week in the journal PLoS ONE because he was sauced. Brian was present at the Dirtymon party, however, held later that evening.
“We’ve been sitting around, some of us smelling the thing. Byorn told me it smells of tainted sausages, and that started this huge argument over who would have made sausages. Before you knew it, we broke out the bottles of Vodka and formulated hypotheses into the wee hours of the morning,” said paleontologist Stu Karalewitz.
Byorn was not available for an interview. Byorn Mandata, paleontologist and dancer extraordinaire, was physically restrained by co-workers later that same evening. “He jumped up, knocking over one of the vodka bottles, ran over to the thing and started screaming, ‘I loves the tainted sausage of the Dirtymon! I wants me some of that tainted sausage of Dirtymon!!!,’ and then he started doing this very strange hunching motion on Dirtius Maxus.”
Dirtymon remains intact and smells just fine. When the public will get to see him has yet to be determined.
One of these was spotted as far north as Maryland not too long ago.
ReplyDeleteI've rather suspected this...it explains a lot.
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