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 Bosnian Pyramids at Visoko
In 2005 the businessman Semir Osmanagić announced that the hill of Visočica above the town of Visoko was the oldest pyramid in the world, 220 metres high and built twelve thousand years ago, and began excavating on donations and municipal money. In 2006 the European Association of Archaeologists issued a formal statement, signed by four leading European archaeologists, calling the project a cruel hoax and demanding a halt to work that was destroying genuine medieval and Roman layers on the hill. Geologists described Visočica as a flatiron — a natural landform of Miocene conglomerate, of which the valley has several; the paved slabs proved to be fractured sandstone.
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