Small Miracle

In Wyoming's Big Horn Basin one day last year a young laborer attached to a paleontological expedition from Princeton University dug out a chunk of fine-grained, greenish-grey sandstone. He could see hat this hard matrix contained fossil fragments, but the bones were so small that he tossed it aside. On second thought he picked it up again, handed it to Expedition Leader Glenn Lowell Jepsen. Red-laired, laconic Paleontologist Jepsen recognized at a glance that the fossil might be important. He cut the sandstone into three pieces, sent them to a skilled preparator named Albert Thomson in Manhattan's American Museum of Natural Histoiy. Mr. Thomson was confronted with the toughest extraction job of his life. Cautiously he attacked the sandstone with needle-like awls, sharpened under a microscope that magnified them to the size of broom handles. After long months of picking and scratching, the dismembered skeleton was finally free of its matrix and the preparator sent it back to Dr. Jepsen.

Last week in Princeton Dr. Jepsen pronounced the bones to be those of a leaping primate the size of a rat and structurally akin to the modern lemur, which lived in the Paleocene epoch of 60,000,000 years ago. Only a few toes were missing. So far as the paleontologist knew it was the most complete Paleocene skeleton of any sort ever recovered. Preserved even was a hyoid bone which served to support chin and jaw muscles. This bone was an eighth of an inch long, no thicker than a horsehair. Dr. Jepsen could assign no certain reason for such miraculous preservation but he thought it possible that the little body had fallen into the edge of a pond or puddle and been covered quickly with protecting sand. No attempt will be made to reassemble the skeleton as no wire fine enough for the job is available. Drawings will be made of each separate bone and then a sketch done of the skeleton as it would look if assembled. Finally the creature will be assigned a name, probably from the Latin or Greek words for "sharp teeth."

Because of its resemblance to the lemur, the question arose whether this primitive primate could have been a human ancestor. Dr. Jepsen thought not. Such a possibility would have been more favorably considered years ago when man was believed to have descended from a protolemuroid stock and it was paleontologically fashionable to speak of the "lemuroid phase" in the evolution of Anthropoidea (apes, monkeys, humans). Recent research in comparative anatomy has tended to displace the lemurs, as human ancestors, in favor of a small, tree-living nocturnal animal called Tarsius which has a thumb opposable to its fingers, eats with its hands and gives birth to one young at a time.* If there was a Tarsius on the human family tree, Dr. Jepsen thinks the little sharp-toothed primate of Big Horn Basin was his contemporary--a sort of cousin.

*Tarsius also has a tail with fur at both ends, bare in the middle.

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