deciding to sell it anonymously via a German fossil dealer. Two German museums turned it down as too expensive. A year later at the Hamburg Fossil and Mineral Fair in December 2006, the dealer asked Norwegian vertebrate palaeontologist Jørn Hurum, who had done some previous deals, to discuss something privately. The dealer showed Hurum three high resolution colour photographs of the fossil and told him that the asking price was $1 million. Hurum knew that it was a primate and according to Tudge's book "was fast concluding that the specimen he was looking at could be one of the holy grails of science — the 'missing link' from the crucial time period." He asked for time until after Christmas to organise funding to pay for the specimen and ensure that it had been legally collected, had an export permit and would be legitimately available for study. His first choice was the Natural History Museum of Oslo, but it was beyond their means and he began to think of other museums with sponsors available. He persuaded the Oslo museum to make half the funding available with the remainder to be paid only after X-ray scans proved conclusively that it was not a fake, a process which took several months. He put together a team including leading German experts on the Messel fossils, ensuring international ownership. After its acquisition it was studied in secret for two years by a team of scientists led by Hurum, who was joined by primate evolution expert Professor Philip Gingerich of the University of Michigan and palaeontologists Jens Franzen, who had studied the counter slab, and Jörg Habersetzer of the Senckenberg Museum's Research Institute. Publication While studies were in progress, negotiations were put in place for a book and with various broadcasters for documentary programs, all of whom agreed to keep the project secret. A deal went through in the summer of 2008 with The History Channel which has been reported as paying more for this than any other documentary. The team decided to publish their findings online in PLoS ONE, an open access journal of the Public Library of Science. The paper for publication was received by PLoS ONE on March 19, 2009 and accepted on May 12, 2009. On 15 May The Wall Street Journal carried a report with interviews with Gingerich and with Tim White, who cautioned that "Lemur advocates will be delighted, but