Iyad Zalmout was born in Syria. He developed a love for geology growing up in the mountains collecting fossil gastropods and bivalves to show his friends - this later morphed into collecting lizards and snakes to scare his class mates. Iyad completed his PhD at the University of Michgan with Phil Gingrich on "Late Eocene sea cows (Mammalia, Sirenia) from Wadi al Hitan in the Fayum Basin, Egypt" and has stayed as a Post-doc in the Exhibit Museum.
A year ago Iyad was looking for whale fossils in a presumed to be section of marine sediments when he began to discover terrestrial mammal fossils. He was amazed to discover what is problably the last common ancestor of apes and monkeys before the two lineages separated. With a major discovery like this, press releases were made both by the publishing journal Nature and the University of Michigan. The reading this week will be the paper published in Nature.
Slide show of the primate fossils