[4] Some of Norway's leading biologists, among them Nils Christian Stenseth, have called the fossil an "exaggerated hoax" and stated that its presentation and popular dissemination "fundamentally violate scientific principles and ethics.

This contrasts with the motive openly stated by the authors, which was to list 30 anatomical and morphological characteristics "commonly used" to distinguish extant strepsirrhine and haplorrhine primates.

Paleontologist Callum Ross of the University of Chicago considered the claim that Darwinius should be classified as haplorhine was "unsupportable in light of modern methods of classification.

[17] Philip D. Gingerich states that the seven superfamilies of primates are commonly associated in the higher taxonomic groupings of suborders Anthropoidea and Prosimii as an alternative to Haplorhini and Strepsirrhini, depending on the position of Adapoidea and Tarsioidea.

Seiffert believes that characteristics that appeared to show a relationship to haplorrhines are due to convergent evolution[21] and has said that "the PR hype surrounding the Darwinius description was very confusing.”[22] The type specimen is missing only its left rear leg.

It has been named Ida[4] after the daughter of Jørn Hurum, the Norwegian vertebrate paleontologist from the Natural History Museum, University of Oslo, who secured one section of the fossil from an anonymous owner and led the research.

[24] 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.

[26] 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.

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.

The primary slab remained in Germany in the possession of a private collector who kept it secret for twenty years before deciding to sell it anonymously via a German fossil dealer.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

"[4] 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 on a program on the Predator X, a giant pliosaur from Svalbard, was brought in on the project in order to "take story straight to the masses in a way that would appeal to the average person, especially kids".

[39] The press conference and paper on the fossil was accompanied by the launch of a website[40] the publication of a book which had already been distributed to bookstores, The Link: Uncovering Our Earliest Ancestor by Colin Tudge,[32] and the announcement of a documentary (Uncovering Our Earliest Ancestor: The Link), made by Atlantic Productions in the UK, directed by Tim Walker and produced by Lucie Ridout, to be screened six days later on the History Channel (US), BBC One (UK),[33] and various stations in Germany and Norway.

[41] One of the paper's co-authors, paleontologist Philip D. Gingerich, expressed dissatisfaction with the media campaign, telling The Wall Street Journal that they had chosen to publish in PLoS ONE as "There was a TV company involved and time pressure" and they had been pushed to finish the study.

[6][46] ScienceBlogger Brian Switek questioned the sensationalist coverage of claims of ancestral relationships made before a full cladistic analysis,[47] 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.

"[30] 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.

Others including Chris Beard were concerned that the price and publicity could lead to profiteering by amateur collectors, and make acquisition of specimens for research purposes more difficult.