the importance of the find before information was available for scrutiny. Chris Beard, curator of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, was "awestruck" by the publicity machine but concerned that if the hype was exaggerated, it could damage the popularisation of science if the creature was not all that it was hyped up to be. Paleoanthropologist Elwyn Simons of Duke University stated that it is a wonderful specimen but most of the information had been previously known, and paleoanthropologist Peter Brown of the University of New England said that the paper had insufficient evidence that Darwinius was ancestral to the simians. Others have also criticized claims that the fossil represents the "missing link in human evolution", arguing that there is no such thing unless evolution is visualized as a chain as there are an enormous number of missing branches, and that while the fossil is a primate, there is no evidence to suggest that its species is a direct ancestor of humans. ScienceBlogger Brian Switek questioned the sensationalist coverage of claims of ancestral relationships made before a full cladistic analysis, and in a column in The Times he stated that a unique opportunity to communicate science had been lost, with press releases forestalling the necessary discovery and debate which should now proceed. Hurum considered that the risk of buying the fossil had paid off, and said that "You need an icon or two in a museum to drag people in, this is our Mona Lisa and it will be our Mona Lisa for the next 100 years." He has been described as "a modern-era, media-savvy scientist with the right amounts of showmanship, populist sensibility, and disregard for the normal avenues of scientific prestige required to pull this off". The debut in "an astonishingly slick, multi-component media package" required exceptional coordination between networks, museums, producers and scientists while maintaining a level of secrecy which is hard to attain in modern circumstances. In interviews published on 27 May, Hurum stated that it was good that they had got the message out that primates were rooted deep in time, but that some of the slogans were too much and the publicity got completely out of control. He disclosed that he paid nearly $750,000 (£465,000) for the specimen, but felt it was worthwhile to make the fossil available for scientific investigation instead of it being bought by a private collector and hidden away. Others