Does Darwinius Exist?

Darwinius has achieved the ultimate triumph of pop-culture consciousness, having become for the moment the background image on the main Google search page. But some of the commenters in my post yesterday on the head-slapping hype around this fossil pointed out something I thought deserving of its own post: Darwinius may not actually exist.

By this I mean that the name Darwinius may not be valid officially published. I first became aware of this from Nature editor Henry Gee’s twitterings. The pro