thumbs and nails instead of claws. These would have provided a "precision grip" which, for Ida, was useful for climbing and gathering fruit. Ida also has flexible arms and relatively short limbs. The fossil is missing two anatomical features found in modern lemurs: a grooming claw on the foot and a fused row of teeth, a toothcomb, in the bottom jaw. Digital reconstructions of Ida's teeth reveal that she has unerupted molars in her jaw, indicating by comparison with modern squirrel monkeys that she was 9–10 months old and would have reached adulthood at 36 months. The shape of Ida's teeth provides clues as to her diet; jagged molars would have allowed her to slice food, suggesting that she was a leaf and seed eater. This is confirmed by the remarkable preservation of her gut content. Furthermore, the lack of a baculum (penis bone) found in all lower primates means that the fossil was from a female. X-rays performed on Ida revealed that her right wrist was healing from a fracture which may have contributed to her death. The scientists speculate whether she was overcome by carbon dioxide fumes while drinking from the Messel lake. Hampered by her broken wrist, she slipped into unconsciousness, was washed into the lake and sank to the bottom, where unique fossilisation conditions preserved her for 47 million years. Discovery and acquisition The events regarding the original unearthing of the fossil are not clear, though some facts are known. It was found at the Messel pit in 1983, a disused shale quarry noted for its astonishing fossil preservation, near the village of Messel about southeast of Frankfurt am Main in Germany. The fossil came as a slab and partial counter slab and was expertly prepared by encasing each slab in resin using the transfer technique necessary to conserve Messel fossils. At some point the slab and counter slab went separate ways. The counter slab was incorporated in a composite of fabricated parts to represent a complete specimen and arrived at a private Wyoming museum in 1991. Analysis by Jens Franzen of the Natural History Museum of Basel, Switzerland revealed the mixed actual and faked nature of this slab. A comparison of the two slabs indicates that the forger had access to the whole fossil. The primary slab remained in Germany in the possession of a private collector who kept it secret for twenty years before