Information AboutArchaeoraptor |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT ARCHAEORAPTOR | |
| feathered dinosaurs | |
| hoaxes in science | |
| invalid dinosaurs | |
| nomina nuda | |
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HISTORY The purported Fossil of Archaeoraptor was found in 1998 at a gem show in Tucson, Arizona . It had been found in the Liaoning Province of China , sold on the Black Market and smuggled out of China and into the United States . Stephen Czerkas, owner of the Dinosaur Museum in Blanding, Utah , purchased it for $80,000 and contacted paleontologist Phil Currie and the National Geographic Society . Currie agreed to study the fossil on condition that it was eventually returned to China. The society intended to announce the find to the larger public, immediately after a publication in ''Nature''. During the first investigation it already became clear to Currie that the left and right leg mirrored each other perfectly and that the fossil had been completed by using both slab and counterslab. He then sent it to Timothy Rowe in Austin to make CAT Scan s. These indicated that the bottom fragments were not part of the larger fossil. This was confirmed through a close study by Currie's preparator, Kevin Aulenback. Currie did not inform National Geographic of these problems.Chambers, Paul, 2002, ''Bones of Contention''. The fossil was unveiled in a press conference on ''. However, ''Nature'' and '' Science '' both rejected the paper, and ''National Geographic'' went ahead and published without peer review.1 After the November ''National Geographic'' came out, Storrs L. Olson , curator of birds in the National Museum Of Natural History of the Smithsonian Institution published an Open Letter on 1 November 1999 , pointing out that "the specimen in question is known to have been illegally exported"; protesting the "prevailing dogma that birds evolved from dinosaurs", and complaining that Sloan, a journalist, had usurped the process of scientific nomenclature by publishing a name first in the popular press: "This is the worst nightmare of many zoologists—that their chance to name a new organism will be inadvertently scooped by some witless journalist."Storrs L. Olson, 1999. Open letter to:Dr. Peter Raven (This last claim turned out to be wrong because of the disclaimer, so the name was not in fact yet available.) UNCOVERING THE FAKE The ''Archaeoraptor'' specimen was returned by the Czerkases to China. Xu Xing , a member of Beijing 's Institute Of Vertebrate Paleontology And Paleoanthropology had already noticed in October after having been informed by Currie of the problems during a visit to the USA, that the tail of ''Archaeoraptor'' strongly resembled an unnamed Maniraptora n dinosaur — later to be named '' Microraptor Zhaoianus '' — that he was studying, but the front half did not match. He returned to China and traveled to Liaoning Province where he inspected the fossil site. His suspicions that the dinosaur-like tail of the fossil did not belong to the same species were confirmed. In December he contacted a number of Fossil Dealers and eventually found the fossilized body that corresponded to the tail on the archaeoraptor. He informed the National Geographic Society , and CT Scan s funded by the society confirmed his suspicions. The society still believed the fossil to be important, however. By January 2000 the fossil had proven to be fraudulent and ''National Geographic'' retracted their article and promised an investigation. In the October 2000 issue, the magazine published a retraction and an article about the case. A Chinese farmer had created the archaeoraptor fossil by gluing two fossils together, one of which was a '' Microraptor ''. |
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