Chaoyang City

Liaoning and the Piltdown Bird

In November 1999 National Geographic held a press conference for Archaeoraptor liaoningensis, the missing link between dinosaurs and birds, bought at a mineral fair in Arizona for eighty thousand dollars and quarried from the shales of Liaoning. The Chinese palaeontologist Xu Xing saw the article and recognised the tail: he had described it himself, and it belonged to a Microraptor. CT scanning confirmed the slab was glued together from at least two and probably five animals — the body of the bird Yanornis, the tail of a Microraptor. The magazine retracted, and the specimen went into the textbooks as the Piltdown Bird.