Missing piece of faked fossil identified
By Patricia Reaney
LONDON (Reuters) - A fossil once hailed as the missing link between dinosaurs and birds and later found to be a fake is mainly the remains of an extinct bird, scientists said Wednesday.
When the 120 million-year-old Chinese fossil called Archaeoraptor was discovered in 1999, National Geographic magazine touted it as a major find that could settle the debate about whether birds evolved from dinosaurs.
But upon closer examination a panel of experts concluded the fossil was a composite consisting of the tail of a tiny dinosaur and bits of at least one other animal that had been cleverly glued together.
Zhou Zhonghe of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and Julia Clarke of the American Museum of Natural History in New York have identified the other creature in the fossil as a fish-eating bird called Yanornis.
"We've presented the missing piece to the puzzle," Clarke told Reuters in an interview.
Rather than consisting of the remains of two or more species as some paleontologists had suspected, the mysterious bits of the forged fossil, other than the tail, are from one creature.
"Both of the included species are individually telling us important things about the evolution of birds," Clarke added.
FOSSIL THAT FOOLED THE WORLD
Archeoraptor, thought to be the transitional creature between dinosaurs and birds, was about the size of a turkey with a pelvis and tail of a dinosaur and a bird-like head.
But after it was revealed to be a fake it became better known as the fossil that fooled the world, though not for long.
Scientists suspect the composite slab, which was found in the fossil-rich Liaoning province in northeast China, smuggled out of the country and sold to a private dinosaur museum in Utah, was pieced together by fossil hunters to increase its value.
A crack between the body and tail of the fossil raised suspicions about its authenticity. A panel of scientists examined the fossil and National Geographic issued a retraction in April 2000 after the tail portion was identified.
"The unfortunate aspect of the Archaeoraptor forgery was that it was used to suggest that other feathered dinosaur fossils from China were also fakes, which is not the case and simply served to add a layer of confusion to public understanding" said Clarke, whose research is reported in the science journal Nature.
She and Zhou compared detailed features and measurements of the bones from the Archaeoraptor composite slab with a known specimen of Yanornis. Except for the tail from the slab, which is from a small dinosaur known as Microraptor, the rest of the fake belongs to a single species.
"By identifying the other half of Archaeoraptor, we have new information about the study of Yanornis," Clarke said.
"Yanornis turns out to be a key new species for the study of the origins
of all living birds."
11/20/02 13:14 ET