Darwinius has achieved the ultimate triumph of pop-culture consciousness, having become for the moment the background image on the main Google search page. But some of the commenters in my post yesterday on the head-slapping hype around this fossil pointed out something I thought deserving of its own post: Darwinius may not actually exist.

By this I mean that the name Darwinius may not be valid officially published. I first became aware of this from Nature editor Henry Gee’s twitterings. The problem has to do with the fact that the journal where Darwinius was pubished, PLOS One, is only online.

Today Martin Brazeau laid out some details here at the Loom, citing the International Committee