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I’m sure that most of the people here are familiar with Darwinius masillae aka “Ida”, the unusually well-preserved primate fossil which was discovered last month. The reason I’m sure of this is because the media hasn’t been taking any chances with the amount of publicity that they’re giving this discovery. The scientists who published the original paper about it worked together with a production company, in order to ensure that it received the greatest possible amount of media coverage. And as a result, we’ve been seeing advertisements like this one for the documentary about this fossil, claiming “May 25 [the day that the documentary was broadcast] Is Darwinius Day, the most important day in 47 million years!”

Very few people are arguing with the fact that the media is exaggerating this fossil’s importance. It’s one of the best-preserved primate fossils ever discovered, and provides some new insight into the origins of the lineage that eventually led to modern humans, but the day that its documentary was broadcast on TV is not “the most important day in 47 million years.” It’s not more important than the day that the United States was founded, the day that Columbus discovered America, or the day that humans’ ancestors learned how to use tools. Even just within the field of paleontology, it’s probably not more important than Archaeopteryx; and within the area of paleontology that studies human origins, it’s probably not more important than the “Lucy” specimen of Australopithecus.

This hype isn’t just bothersome to people who would rather not see a somewhat important discovery made out to be something that it isn’t. As Carl Zimmer points out here, the original authors’ efforts to orchestrate the largest possible media blitz has actually interfered with the ability of other scientists to study the fossil. It’s also likely to distract attention from other discoveries that are just as important, if not more so. And finally, as P.Z. Myers mentions here, creationists are bound to make the accusation that this fossil is nowhere near as important as the media has been claiming. The irritating thing is that in this case, the creationists will be right.

Still, an argument can be made that this sort of hype is necessary. Your average person generally doesn’t pay much attention to articles that are published in peer-reviewed journals, and even semi-professional magazines such as Scientific American don’t always succeed at making the general public aware of a new discovery. In addition, scientists do need money to perform their research, and nothing generates money quite like this kind of media coverage does. So this month’s topic is: Is this sort of media hype an unavoidable part of science? Or is there a better way to make new discoveries known to the public?

I don’t have a strong opinion about the answer to this, except to say that I think a balanced approach would be best. Ideally, new discoveries should receive a degree of media coverage that’s proportional to their importance. In fact, there are probably situations in which the media has given a new discovery too little coverage, although obviously, it’s inevitable that examples where the media coverage was overblown are better-known than the examples of the opposite.

One example of a discovery that I think received too little coverage from the media is “Lori”, the oldest troodontid fossil ever discovered. As the only troodontid fossil that’s as old as or older than Archaeopteryx, Lori proves that troodontids lived long enough ago that they (or their close relatives) could have been ancestral to birds. Yet as far as I know, Lori has never been described in detail anywhere other than this paper, so creationists such as David Menton have continued to claim that all of the most bird-like dinosaurs lived after Archaeopteryx, even though the linked article by him was published online around three years after Lori was discovered. Perhaps Epidexipteryx, a scansoriopterygid with well-preserved feathers that’s slightly older than Archaeopteryx, will finally change this—Epidexipteryx has received considerably more media coverage than Lori has, with articles about it on sites like MSNBC and Discover Magazine’s blogs. But it still never received anything like the degree of publicity that Ida is getting, which is unfortunate, because it probably deserved it a lot more than Ida does.

As mentioned in the articles I linked to about Ida, there’s been a fair amount of backlash from the scientific community about this discovery’s media hype. Perhaps this will be enough that the next time scientists consider trying to orchestrate something like this about a discovery of only moderate importance, they’ll remember the backlash that happened in Ida’s case, and think better of it.

—*Agahnim