Fossil Fraud: Products of Until the Last Century, Interpretations of Fossil Remains Were Even Trickery and Sensationalism More Speculative Than Today
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Early Interpretations of Fossils Fossil Fraud: Products of Until the last century, interpretations of fossil remains were even Trickery and Sensationalism more speculative than today. Because many dinosaurs and other extinct animals were known only from fragmental material, many reconstructions were way off ! For example, here are two representations of the dinosaur Iguanodon. Early Reconstruction Modern Reconstruction (early 1800s) Early Frauds Blatant Deseption That People Still Fall For As members of the general public were both enamored by the remains of In the 1930s, American Museum ancient animals and blissfully ignorant of the details of vertebrate paleontologist Roland T. Bird paid a anatomy, it was easy to mislead a great many people. visit to the Paluxy River limestone beds near Glen Rose, Texas, to see A number of individuals made a good living by displaying impressive- a spectacular dinosaur trackway. looking, but bogus fossil skeletons. Bird's visit came during the This illustration drawn in 1845 Depression, and some locals accompanied Albert Koch's description decided to sell tracks from the of a "gigantic fossil reptile" 114 feet region in hopes of making some long. much needed cash. They quickly figured out that it was easier to In truth, Koch pieced together the carve footprints directly into the bones of five fossil whales, then rock. showed the specimen in the U.S. and in England. The Paluxy footprints are still cited by creationists as “proof” that The hoax was exposed on both sides humans lived alongside dinosaurs. of the Atlantic. Paluxy River “human footprints” 1 The Gravels of Piltdown The Story of Piltdown Man Dawson claimed that workmen at a the gravel pit near the village of Piltdown, U.K., had given him a piece One of the most famous cases of of human skull in fossil fraud is that of Piltdown Man. 1908. Piltdown Man was so-named after Dawson brought fossil remains of an apparently these bones to the primitive form of a hominid were attention of Arthur brought to the attention to scientists Woodward of the by amateur archaeologist Charles British Museum. Dawson. Dawson then Charles Dawson undertook his own dig at the gravel pit site Additional Material Significance of Timing In 1912, digging The discovery of Piltdown Man was very alongside timely Woodward, Dawson found found more It came 50 years after Darwin published skull fragments and On the Origin of Species, just when a fragment of a many people were beginning to think peculiar-looking about our ancestors and question what jawbone. kind of creature might have bridged the Skull fragments gap between apes and us. Skull cap of Java Man Due to their close proximity to one At the time of the discovery, the only another the jaw and evidence we had of early humans was the skull fragments were Dawson and Woodward skull cap of Java Man (Homo erectus), interpreted to have thought to have lived 700,000 years ago, been derived from and the jaw of Heidelberg Man (archaic Outside view of jaw the same skull. Homo sapiens), estimated to have lived Jaw of Jaw of about 500,000 years ago. Heidelberg Man modern human 2 Acceptance by Scientific Community Human, Ape, or Both ? In December, 1912, Woodward The find made the two men presented a reconstruction of the skull at a meeting of the Geological Society very excited because the jaw of London, where he argued its was very ape-like and the primitive origins. skull fragments were definitely of human origin. He concluded that the remains came from a human who had probably lived The apparent combination of about 500,000 years ago during the characteristics that were, on early part of the Pleistocene epoch. one hand, distinctly human, and on the other, ape-like, A few doubters felt that the jaw was too “apish,” to have been derived from the seemed to suggest that the otherwise human-like skull former owner of these Skull reconstruction showing skeletal elements was the Woodward’s supporters eventually won Arthur Woodward’s positions of fragments found “missing link” that had been the debate, and the hominid species reconstruction of Piltdown sought for so long. entered the scientific literature as Man skull Eoanthropus dawson (Dawson’s dawn man). Suspicion Additional “Evidence” All evidence suggested that the Excitement continued to grow Piltdown Man was the earliest- as additional material known human from Western surfaced at a site about 2 Europe. miles from that of the original discovery. This By the time new finds of ancient additional material Tooth of Stegadon hominids were being uncovered in (an extinct Artist’s reconstruction of Piltdown Man included: Africa by Raymond Dart, it elephant) became apparent that the Piltdown remains did not match 1. A “bone tool.” were radically unlike anything else Piece of elephant found in the fossil record. 2. Fossil bones and teeth of femur (shaped like animal species known to a cricket bat, Yet for over three decades, Piltdown strangely enough) Man was accepted as an authentic have existed during the extinct hominid. Australopithecus africanus, Pleistocene. Tooth of extinct Discovered by Raymond Dart in 1924 beaver in South Africa. 3 The Fraud Exposed Further, it became apparent that the jawbone was from an orangutan. The teeth had been filed down (as indicated by unusual “wear pattern” concentrated on the outside edge of the tooth). In 1953 a team of three scientists (Sir Wilfrid Le Gros Clark, Kenneth Oakley and Joseph Weiner) at the British Clearly, the “artifacts” had been planted at the Piltdown site, but Museum conducted a series of rigorous perpetrators obviously had a good knowledge of Pleistocene geology and analyses on the remains. Pleistocene-age mammals (this was no amateur job). The skull fragments turned out to have been of Medieval age. Real human cranial fragments The jawbone was also determined to have been very recent in age. Piltdown jaw Further study of the bone indicated that the jaw fragment been artificially stained Orangutan with potassium dichromate to make it jaw look old. Stained jaw fragment Who Did It ? Even now, the perpetrator is The Archaeoraptor fiasco: unknown, but Dawson remains the Rise and Fall of the “Piltdown Turkey” primary suspect (it was found that he had trafficked in other fake artifacts). Martin Hinton, a British Museum employee has also been implicated since a boxful of artificially stained bones (contained in a forgotten trunk) were linked to him in 1975. Besides Dawson, suspects include English anatomist Sir Arthur Keith and British Museum employee Martin Stained bones found in Hinton. Some speculation has even Hinton’s forgotten trunk fingered Sir Arthur Conan Doyle of (found in a loft within the Sherlock Holmes fame (he also wrote British Museum) The Lost World). 4 Report of an Exciting Discovery Tucson Show Stephen Czerkas, owner of the Dinosaur Museum in Monticello, Utah, A single specimen of an unusual purchased it for $80,000 at the 1998 Tucson gem show, the largest vertebrate animal christened Archaeoraptor liaoningensis, captured show of its kind in the world. Mindful of the possible significance of the the world’s attention in November, 1999, fossil, he then contacted the National Geographic Society. when the National Geographic Magazine published an article about what they thought was an amazing fossil discovery. With its mix of dinosaur and bird-like (specimen viewed under visible light) features, many palaeontologists believed that Archaeoraptor captured the moment in evolution when dinosaurs were experimenting with flight. It reportedly came from a site in China's Liaoning Province, already famous for yielding exceptionally well-preserved specimens of birds and feathered dinosaurs. (specimen viewed under UV light) The society made a deal to study it and eventually return it to China. Feathered Dinosaurs The Dino-bird Controversy: Some Background To fully appreciate the significance of the Archaeoraptor find, we should briefly look at a recent revolution in dinosaur paleontology – the notion that birds directly descended from dinosaurs. In the late 1990s, remarkably well Ever since the discovery of fossils of the preserved skeletons of small meat- primitive bird Archaeopteryx in the mid- to eating began to be found in late-1800s, a direct evolutionary Liaoning Province, China. relationship between dinosaurs has been accepted by most paleontologists. Significantly, these dinosaurs looked like small, but fairly typical- Archaeopteryx (found in limestones of looking meat-eating dinosaurs of Jurassic age) shares features of both the Cretaceous Period. dinosaurs and bird. But these dinosaurs were found But some scientists believe that birds spilt with feathers (not only down, but much earlier from a more primitive reptilian also plumage) ! lineage, and that the similarities between Caudipteryx Archaeopteryx and dinosaurs are due to evolutionary convergence. 5 Significance of Feathers Sensationalism and the Media The presence of feathers in these Christopher Sloan, the author of the National Geographic article dinosaurs is significant in that it wrote: suggests that feathers first “Its long arms and small body scream BIRD” evolved in dinosaurs and that birds “Its long, stiff tail… screams “DINOSAUR” then evolved from dinosaurs. So… these fossils suggest that the original use of feathers was for insulation and display. But still, the features preserved in these specimens are closer to dinosaur than to bird. So paleontologists were (and still are) holding their breath for a more bird-like form. Sinosauropteryx Initial Suspicions Computed Tomography Shortly after National Geographic’s report of the discovery of the Archaeoraptor specimen, Xu Xing, a Chinese scientist who had initially helped to identify the fossil announced that he had found the counterpart slab of Archaeoraptor’s tail. Computed Tomography (CT), a technique commonly used in Unfortunately, the slab did prove to be the exact mirror-image of the tail, but the medical examination, was used body associated with the tail was that of a dinosaur.