The skull pictured above was found in the Djurab Desert in northern Chad in 2001. It has been dated to somewhere between six and seven million years ago. But what is it? Its owner had a small brain and a protruding brow, like an ape, but also had a smallish jaw and an opening for the spine that hinted it could be a hominid. If so, it would be the oldest hominid fossil ever discovered. But where is the line between apes and hominids? The paleontology world in the 21st century looks at it as whether the creature walked on two legs or four. What is called the Toumaï skull was assigned the species name Sahelanthropus tchadensis, but that didn't classify where it stood in the evolution of humans. If only there were other bones that could indicate whether S. tchadensis walked on two legs, the question could be laid to rest. But it turns out there were other bones.
Paleontologists are ambitious scientists. Paleoanthropologists, who study human fossils, are the most ambitious, since finding a hominid fossil can make up for years of fruitless digging. The Holy Grail of paleoanthropology is to find the earliest hominid, which brings worldwide acclaim in the field. In paleontology, there are certain ethical conventions that govern the ownership of fossils, the hierarchy of academic publishing, and the need to share research so that it can be confirmed. That all went out the window in the case of the Toumaï skull, as a femur found with the skull could be the key to what kind of creature S. tchadensis really was. The feuding and subterfuge went on for years as reputations and careers were shattered, and still hasn't been resolved. Read the gripping story of the French paleoanthropologists who had so much riding on the research into the Toumaï skull at The Guardian. -via Damn Interesting
(Image credit: Didier Descouens)