This Hurts Me More Than It Hurts You!

A controversy is raging this morning in the French Academy of Science between factions of zoologists and palaeontologists. The argument centres on the identification of a fossil skull found by student naturalists doing field work near the northern French village of D’Eau-Remy.

The more conservative scientists hold the majority position that the skull is from an extinct species of Ape similar to the Barbary ape of Gibraltar, which is the last living primate still found in Europe. Spokesman for this opinion, Dr. Luke Monand of the University of Lyons, stated that many types of primate roamed what is now Italy and Spain about five million years ago, and it has long been theorised that some may have even travelled as far as the Franco-German border.

The lesser-held but more spectacular view stated by Auguste Delacorde of the Natural History Museum of Paris declares that the skull is from neither ape nor man and accepts the find as positive proof of the existence of the legendary monster known to the ancient Frankish tribes as “Tit-dos” (pronounced tee-doe), in many ways similar to the North American Sasquatch and the Tibetan Yeti.

The task of identifying the fossil has been given to Dr. Hardy Froliche of the Museum of Life (Musee de la Vie) in Geneva and Isabel Deschamps of the French Academy, both noted palaeontologists. The European scientific community is now waiting the answer to one of the most unusual problems ever encountered.

Did the skull belong to a well-travelled ape or is the D’Eau-Remi fossil a Tit-dos?