tarsier advocates will be underwhelmed". At about the same time a press release headed "World Renowned Scientists Reveal a Revolutionary Scientific Find That Will Change Everything" announced that the find was "lauded as the most significant scientific discovery of recent times." On May 19, 2009 the team revealed their findings to the world at a press conference simultaneously with online publication of the paper in PLoS ONE (for naming purposes, the paper was officially published in print on May 21, 2009). The paper included a statement that the authors were not advocating the possibility that the species could be ancestral to later anthropoid primates; Professor John Fleagle, of Stony Brook University in New York state, asserted that he was one of the anonymous scientific reviewers of the paper and that he had explicitly requested before publication that the authors tone down their original claims that the fossil was on the human evolutionary line. At the press conference the fossil was described as the "missing link" in human evolution. Hurum said that “this fossil rewrites our understanding of the evolution of primates...it will probably be pictured in all the textbooks for the next 100 years" and compared its importance to the Mona Lisa. He also said that Darwinius was "the closest thing we can get to a direct ancestor" and that finding it was "a dream come true". Team member Jens Franzen said the state of preservation was "like the Eighth Wonder of the World", with information "palaeontologists can normally only dream of", but while he said it bore "a close resemblance to ourselves" in some aspects, other features indicated that it was not a direct ancestor. Independent experts were quick to question the claims. Henry Gee, a senior editor at Nature, said the term "missing link" was misleading and that the scientific community would need to evaluate its significance, which was unlikely to match that of Homo floresiensis or feathered dinosaurs. Chris Beard, curator of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, said he "would be absolutely dumbfounded if it turns out to be a potential ancestor to humans." Publicity and media coverage Having previously experienced how the blogosphere had picked up on his work, and seen Chinese dinosaur finds the object of bad early descriptions from blogging, Jørn Hurum decided to orchestrate launch of the fossil in a combined scientific and public event. Atlantic Productions, which had cooperated with Hurum