Ida is an interesting fossil from an interesting period in primate evolution, but the mass-media hype about a "missing link" in the popular sense of the word is way off the mark. Ida is a 50-million-year-old primate which may be an ancestor of modern anthropoids (monkeys, apes, and humans), or may not. Some of Ida's distinguishing features may be the result of distortion of the bones during the fossilization process, and the fossil will need to be studied much more thoroughly before any conclusions can be drawn about its exact place on the evolutionary tree. However, caution and nuance are alien concepts to the mass media while sound bites and buzzwords are red meat; and a "missing link" is more like to attract attention (and controversy, and ratings) than an "early primate which might be an ancestor to modern apes and humans, but we're really not sure yet."

Either way, Ida has no direct relevance to human evolution, which separated from chimpanzee evolution only about 6-7 million years ago. By choosing an attention-grabbing buzzword, however, the media also managed to confuse the timeline by more than 40 million years. It may be wrong, but it helped attract attention, and too many reporters are too ignorant of basic science to know the difference.
Source(s):
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2009/05/missing-links-and-media-circuse...
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn9989-timeline-human-evolution.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_human_evolution


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