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.
The Ica Stones
From 1966 the Peruvian physician Javier Cabrera assembled more than fifteen thousand engraved andesite stones: men riding dinosaurs, heart transplants, telescopes. The collection became a mainstay of the whole literature of forgotten civilisations. They were supplied by a farmer, Basilio Uschuya, and in 1975 he told reporters he was carving them himself — the alternative was answering for trading antiquities. In 1977, for a BBC documentary, he engraved a fresh stone on camera with a dental drill and aged it with shoe polish and stove soot. Not one stone from the collection has ever been recovered from an archaeological layer.
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