Primate (from dictionary.com)

Any of various omnivorous mammals of the order Primates, comprising the three suborders Anthropoidea (humans, great apes, gibbons, Old World monkeys, and New World monkeys), Prosimii (lemurs, loris, and their allies), and Tarsioidea (tarsiers), esp. distinguished by the use of hands, varied locomotion, and by complex flexible behavior involving a high level of social interaction and cultural adaptability.

I agree

That's the idea I think. The missing link is the primate that all modern primates evolved from, or so I believe. So whatever it is, it has to be a very early primate.

You are correct. A primate this early would still bear resmbalance to reptiles as the 'reptile > mammal' evolution was still relatively fresh, so many features would still have been retained.

Agree x2

The missing links are one of the big problems I have with current evolution theory. It doesn't make sense, unless you believe in punctuated equilibrium or some other spin on how to explain it away.

Btw, pretty pathetic how the University of Oslo is trying to hype this fossil as some wonder find. Hilarious article.

"This specimen is like finding the Lost Ark for archeologists" and "His colleague Jens Franzen hailed the discovery as "the eighth wonder of the world." LOL!

wait how can this fossil be 47 million years old? earth has only been around for ten thousand max.

So all possible explanations now and in the future will be 'spin'.  Way to keep an open mind.

This is also ignorance. One: Fossil's are incredibly rare and remains can only be fossilized under very specific conditions. You can't just pick an animal, and a time period and then go find a fossil at will. Naturally there are going to be missing parts. But every year our fossil record becomes larger and larger, and more over what we find is extremely predictable within an evolutionary model. While you can't find just anything like the earths layers are a super market for fossils, you can predict what kind of fossils or features the creatures within certain strata will have and then find exactly what is predicted. The fossil record we have now is vastly more complete than the one we had twenty years ago, which is vastly more complete than the one from fifty years ago, which is astronomically better than what Darwin had.

Two: There will always be missing links because there are no final products. It is a constant gradation from once specie to another, which is why we have ring species. There is no definitive animal within one specie, it is a constant grey line that we fairly arbitrarily divide up. Again look at ring species. If you find one missing link, all you do is create two more on either side of the one you just found as the old joke goes.

The thing is that humans are very unique as we survived while other species of humanoids died off. At one point there were most definitely multiple variations of man-apes. The more fossils we find the more we can figure out our evolutionary tree.