100 Hoaxes & Mistakes That Fooled Science by Popular Science

Author:Popular Science
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Weldon Owen

CHAPTER 4

Animals, Real and Imagined

This supposedly new raptor species turned out to be a mashup of dino bones, handcrafted special for the Chinese black market.

Myth #53

The Archaeoraptor

China’s illegal fossil trade can prove lucrative to agricultural workers. Such a profit was the goal of the farmer who found several broken fossils in a shale pit, cemented them together, and sold the amalgam as an intact specimen to a fossil dealer. In 1999, the fossil made its way—illegally again, thanks to smugglers—to the United States, where it was purchased by Stephen Czerkas, an amateur fossil collector and curator of the Dinosaur Museum in Utah.

Czerkas, eager to make the fossil a key exhibit in his museum, recruited paleontologists to verify the specimen and submitted his find to three publications: Nature, Science, and National Geographic. The consulting scientists warned Czerkas that the fossil was probably a fake, doctored in China to enhance its value. Nature and Science refused to publish a paper on what the collector had named an “archaeoraptor.” National Geographic, unaware of the paleontologists’ review and the subsequent rejection by peer-reviewed journals, held a press conference and published an article on the archaeoraptor in November 1999. This proved to be an embarrassing mistake for the venerable periodical.

At no point did anyone in the professional paleontological community take the archaeoraptor seriously. Stephen Czerkas’ consulting paleontologists did confirm their suspicions that the fossil combined between two and five different specimens, later identified as Microraptor zhaoianus, a small carnivorous dinosaur, and Yanornis martini, an ancient bird of prey. Nevertheless, National Geographic’s premature reveal immediately became fodder for creationists who reject the very possibility of a prehistory that stretches billions of years into the past. Gleefully, some in the scientific community referred to the archaeoraptor as Piltdown Chicken, a play on the infamous Piltdown Man hoax in which British collector Charles Dawson forged a missing link between man and orangutan.

Such glee is misdirected, however. Paleontologists have since discovered other links between birds and dinosaurs, even finding that feathered dinosaurs were common as far back as the Jurassic period. Ironically, the hoax itself obscured two great discoveries: neither Microraptor zhaoianus nor Yanornis martini was known to paleontologists before the archaeoraptor debacle. It turns out that our unknown Chinese farmer, Mr. Czerkas, and the network of smugglers in between had in their possession not one but two remarkable fossils.

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