I think all th eArdi parts were found at one spot. Given the conditions at the site and of the fragments of bones how would anyone know what was being represented.
It appears the fragments were “reconstructed” until they fit together.
A couple of comments on the discovery:
“It was the find of a lifetime. But the team’s excitement was tempered
by the skeleton’s terrible condition. The bones literally crumbled when
touched. White called it road kill. And parts of the skeleton had been
trampled and scattered into more than 100 fragments; the skull was
crushed to 4 centimeters in height. The researchers decided to remove
entire blocks of sediment, covering the blocks in plaster and moving
them to the National Museum of
Ethiopia in Addis Ababa to finish
excavating the fossils.
It took three field seasons to
uncover and extract the skeleton,
repeatedly crawling the site to
gather 100% of the fossils present.
At last count, the team had
cataloged more than 110 specimens
of Ar. ramidus, not to mention
150,000 specimens of fossil
plants and animals.
www.sciencemag.org/ardipithecus/326_36.pdf
National Geographic put it thus:
After Ardi died, her remains apparently were trampled down into mud by hippos and other passing herbivores. Millions of years later, erosion brought the badly crushed and distorted bones back to the surface. They were so fragile they would turn to dust at a touch.
“Chalky”? “Squished”? “Badly crushed and distorted”? “Needed extensive digital reconstruction”? After all the media hype and overblown claims about importance of Ida, forgive me for having an initial reaction of skepticism. How far would you trust a “Rosetta stone” that was initially “crushed to smithereens” and “would turn to dust at a touch”?
Claims of bipedalism often depend upon precise measurements of the angles of key bones such as the pelvis, femur, and knee-bones. But if these bones were discovered in such a crushed, squished, etc. form, determining the precise contours of these bones might become a highly subjective exercise. I’m sure they spent a lot of time on their reconstructions (and it certainly sounds like they did) but at the end of the day, it’s difficult to make solid claims about extremely unsolid bones.
Anyone for some Irish stew?
www.evolutionnews.org/.../key_bones_of_new_hominid_fossi02619...”
As I read it, there were two different species of Ardipithecus -- ramadus (4.4 million years) and kadabba (5.6 million years) -- discovered in at least three different locations, and including at least eleven individuals.
Here (on left) are some of the ramadus bones and (on right) kadabba:
