Fake fossils
A nebulous trade in forged and illegal fossils is an ever-growing headache for palaeontologists.
A hotly anticipated press conference was held in Washington, DC on 15 October 1999 by National Geographic magazine. With much fanfare, they announced the discovery of a new feathered fossil from China that was a chimera with a fascinating mix of characters. A team of palaeontologists, enthusiastic amateurs and editorial staff were behind the naming and description of the species, dubbed Archaeoraptor liaoningensis. It was to be unveiled in the November issue of the magazine. In an article covering the crop of feathered dinosaurs discovered in the preceding few years, senior assistant editor Christopher Sloan wrote: ‘With arms of a primitive bird and the tail of a dinosaur, this creature found in Liaoning Province, China, is a true missing link in the complex chain that connects dinosaurs to birds.’
But all was not as it seemed. What AMNH palaeontologist Mark Norell later described as an ‘unfortunate chapter’ in modern palaeontology would foreshadow a growing and serious problem of fraudulent fossils being produced on an industrial scale in China. ‘To formally name a dinosaur, or any other species, a description must be prepared and published’, wrote Norell in his book Unearthing the Dragon:
For important and high-profile specimens like this one, such descriptions often appear in top-ranked international scientific journals. The two most prestigious are Science and Nature. Peer review, and pre-peer review, had rejected the paper’s conclusions and evidence and it never appeared in a scientific journal.
So why did National Geographic choose to go ahead and publish a description of the species when it had been turned down by academic journals? For a non-academic, popular magazine it was heading into uncharted and risky territory.
The team behind the announcement had no idea on that fateful October day, but within just a few months Archaeoraptor liaoningensis would be revealed as one of the biggest fossil hoaxes in history, and the chance discovery of another fossil by Xu Xing was the key to uncovering the deception. Archaeoraptor was soon dubbed the ‘Piltdown bird’ and the ‘Piltdown chicken’ by the press, in reference to another major fossil hoax in which faked remains of putative early hominids were dug up from Piltdown in England in 1912. For National Geographic – a bastion of publishing usually beyond reproach – this embarrassment would be one of the greatest blunders in its 125-year history. But more on that later.
Amateur collectors
The problem of faked fossils in China is serious and growing. It is exacerbated by the fact that most of the fossils are pulled from the ground by desperately poor farmers and then sold on to dealers and museums rather than being found by palaeontologists on fossil digs, which is how specimens are discovered in most other parts of the world.
Liaoning, once known as Manchuria, was annexed by the Japanese as part of the puppet state of Manchukuo from 1931 until the conclusion of World War II in 1945. A few hundred kilometres north-east of Beijing, this impoverished region of China borders North Korea to the east and the Yellow Sea to the south. ‘At the hub of China’s military industrial engine, its cities are polluted, post-apocalyptic landscapes’, writes Norell in Unearthing the Dragon. ‘The countryside is lush green and stifling hot for half of the year and brown, bleak and cold during the other half.’
Peppered with farmland and factories, Liaoning has been a centre for palaeontological activity since the early 1990s, when many early bird fossils were found there. When Sinosauropteryx – the first known feathered dinosaur – was discovered there in 1996, it spurred a fossil hunting gold rush the likes of which had never been seen before.
‘[Liaoning] is renowned for the fossils that document, in often vivid detail, virtually the entire biota that lived over a period of several million years during the Early Cretaceous, about 125 million years ago’, writes Lawrence Witmer, professor of palaeontology and anatomy at Ohio University in Athens, the United States. ‘Although exquisite fossils of diverse vertebrates, invertebrates and plants have been recovered, it’s the spectacular feathered dinosaurs that have received most attention and caused much controversy.’
Cretaceous-era Liaoning was rich with lakes and marshes, which – combined with plenty of volcanic eruptions – made an ideal environment for preserving large numbers of fossils, often in great detail. But that’s not the only reason Liaoning is producing more fossils than any other part of the world today – China can also invest enormous manpower in recovering fossils. ‘Some of these localities are unquestionably very rich in fossils but … the success is clearly linked to the almost unlimited labour available in China’, says Luis Chiappe, director of the Dinosaur Institute at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. He describes the work being done there as the ‘palaeontological parallel of the construction of the Great Wall of China’.
Thousands of farmers have become ‘bone diggers’, who find fossils and sell them to dealers. Although it is illegal, numerous farmers today are involved in digging, which continually yields new species. High-quality fossils can sell for tens of thousands of dollars, so finding one is akin to hitting the jackpot when your monthly earnings total a few dollars or less.
‘Most of the fossils in museums in China have been purchased from the farmers or the local people who dig them up’, Chiappe explains. ‘Some Chinese museums have their own expeditions and go out to collect, but the amount of fossils you can collect in two to three weeks is the same as here [the United States]. I mean you’ll be happy if you come back with something, but the bulk of what is collected in China has entirely been dug up by the farmers.’
Xu agrees that many of the specimens from Liaoning have come from farmers and dealers, but adds that fossils he has described from elsewhere, such as Inner Mongolia and Shandong Province, have been excavated by his own team. He doesn’t like to buy fossils and has bought fewer in recent years, but he’s often faced with a difficult decision: if he chooses not to purchase an important fossil it could be lost forever into a private collection, but if he does purchase it, it encourages farmers to keep on digging.
Having thousands of farmers looking out for fossils is a double-edged sword. Though many more fossils are being discovered, they are collected and prepared in a way that destroys much of the useful scientific information. If scientists don’t know which location and rock layers the fossils come from, they can’t precisely pinpoint their age and also struggle to confirm their veracity.
Knowing which layers of rock fossils were found in is the key to dating them, based on the geological study of the layering of rocks known as stratigraphy. Older fossils are found in deeper layers, with younger and younger fossils found in successive layers on top. Fossils are typically dated geochemically, by looking at tiny but predictable changes in the radioactivity of elements in the rocks that surround them. Over time, some naturally unstable elements decay into others, and the period of time it takes for half a sample of, say, potassium 40 to decay into argon 40 is known as its half-life (in this case 1.26 billion years). By measuring the ratio of potassium 40 to argon 40, scientists can tell how old a rock layer is. Other radioactive materials and elements can be dated in similar ways, and are also used for radiometric dating. When the same rock layer appears across a whole region, we know that fossils found in it all date to roughly the same age range, which would typically encompass several million years.
Not having good stratigraphic control for the specimens dug up by farmers and sold on to dealers is a major problem. Chiappe gives as an example a study he is conducting on fossils of the early bird Confuciusornis, which is one of the most abundant fossils found in Liaoning. His team has measured 180 specimens, and they compare them as though all 180 lived at the same time.
‘We treat them as a modern population, but they aren’t a modern population’, he says. ‘They have lived thousands, hundreds of thousands, maybe sometimes even millions of years apart.’ If the scientists had data on the precise age of the fossils, they might be able to look into whether the species had undergone changes over time, and with better data on geographic location, they could look at changes between regions. ‘[But] we don’t know that, because we don’t know exactly where the fossils come from’, Chiappe says.
Sophisticated fakery
Fossils collected without data on the rock layer or precise location are clearly less valuable than fossils collected without this information being recorded. Another much more serious problem, however, is posed by forged, faked and manipulated specimens (such as National Geographic’s Archaeoraptor) which are becoming increasingly common. Farmers who dig for fossils do so to supplement their meagre, largely subsistence-based living, and they are well aware that more complete and spectacular specimens are worth far more than the fragmentary remains they typically dig up. Some don’t even realise they are faking specimens and often combine pieces of different fossils found at the same locale. In the most extreme cases, this manipulation is intentional, and fossils found at disparate locations are joined into single specimens. It sounds crude, but even the experts have to look carefully to detect the trickery when master forgers have been at work.
Fossils can be faked in a variety of ways. Sometimes they’re hewn from parts from the same species but come from different individuals, so you might have a Microraptor specimen with a skull from one individual, a tail from another and a body from a third. Another method involves combining the parts of different species to make a complete fossil that appears to be a new animal. ‘Dinosaurs are very similar to birds, so sometimes these fossils combine different birds, different dromaeosaur specimens, or even birds with dinosaurs’, Xu says. But the most extreme kind of forgery takes fragmentary fossils and carves out the missing parts from the stone. ‘[These forgers] are like artists; they carve the bone from the rock.’
Phil Currie agrees. ‘The Chinese are excellent craftsmen and they have a long, long history of this. If part of the specimen is missing, many of these poachers and amateurs in fact will just restore them or mix specimens together’, he says. ‘If it gets in the wrong place and gets published, then it’s a big problem.’ Trained experts can detect these forgeries, but it requires hard work and careful examination.
In rare cases fossils are completely manufactured from scratch. Currie saw one example in China while on a research trip with Ji Qiang. ‘He got a call that a very nice specimen had been found and it looked like Archaeopteryx’, he says. ‘And so we flew to another part of China to go and look at the specimen based on the photographs, and when he got there, it took just seconds to realise that it wasn’t a real fossil at all. It was basically ground-up bone, glued back together in a certain way to look like Archaeopteryx, but it was almost 100 per cent manufactured.’
It’s a significant hurdle to good science, and one that can’t easily be solved. ‘Fossil forgery in the last decade highlights some troubling trends in Chinese vertebrate palaeontology’, wrote Xiaoming Wang, a palaeontologist at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County in an opinion piece for the journal PNAS:
While fossil forgeries unfailingly stoke public fascination … the widespread damages that forgery causes are often not sufficiently recognised. Amid the renaissance of Chinese palaeontology evidenced by stunning discoveries of inconceivable riches of fossils, palaeontologic science is treading a path never experienced elsewhere: commercialisation of fossils and all that goes with a quasi-free market of fossil trade that has simultaneously become the boom and bane of Chinese vertebrate palaeontology.
The museum boom
As palaeontology has boomed in China so has the museum sector, and new institutions cropping up across the nation have fuelled the market for specimens to fill them. Sometimes these institutions, especially small regional museums, have no trained scientists on staff, and often they’re filled with large numbers of fakes alongside real fossils.
In Shandong Province, 100 kilometres south of Beijing, mineral magnate Zheng Xiaoting has used wealth amassed from gold mining to build the largest collection of complete dinosaur fossils anywhere in the world. The Shandong Tianyu Museum of Nature has more than 2300 specimens of early birds (including around 600 examples of Confuciusornis) and more than 1000 dinosaur fossils, including hundreds of feathered specimens. The Tianyu collection includes important specimens described in top journals Science and Nature, such as Tianyulong, an ornithischian or ‘bird-hipped’ dinosaur that appears to have had protofeathers but is distantly related to the theropods, hinting that feathers may have been widespread across the entire dinosaur group. According to Chiappe, however, even fantastic museums such as this are not immune to the problem of fossil fakery. He believes that most of the fossils at Tianyu have been purchased from diggers without proper documentation, so there is no detailed stratigraphic control for any of the specimens and there is therefore uncertainty about their origins.
Based on his recent trips to China, Chiappe believes around 50 per cent of the specimens he’s seen in regional museums have been enhanced in some way. ‘Sometimes that’s not important. It’s just a little thing that you can highlight and say, “Well, the left hand was sculpted … I’m going to exclude this from my study” ’, he says. ‘But sometimes it’s more significant, and this is after looking very carefully at the specimens. So if you don’t really look carefully at them you could be measuring or doing all sorts of things with them that aren’t reliable.’
Anyone working with Chinese specimens needs to have their eyes open to the risks. In the past some scientists have analysed Chinese fossils based on photographs alone, partly because it can be difficult to gain access to the collections, but this is no longer good enough. The differences between real and faked specimens can be subtle, and must be looked for carefully. ‘You can’t just do this from a photograph that someone sent you’, Chiappe says. ‘There are so many specimens that have been tinkered [with] somehow that you need to have them under a microscope to verify that they are what they look like.’
An investigative report published in Science in 2010 revealed that as many as 80 per cent of marine reptile fossils on display in Chinese museums had been altered or manipulated in some way. Unfortunately, there are few solutions to the problem of faked fossils in China. Laws that forbid the sale of fossils have stemmed some of the trade (they have harsh penalties – ranging from significant fines to execution – but are rarely enforced), yet much of it continues on the black market.
There are, of course, many truly incredible dinosaur museums in China – undoubtedly among the best in the world, with collections of great scientific value. The museums in Lufeng in Yunnan Province and Zigong in Sichuan Province are among very few international sites that have large open digs with partially exposed fossils, in addition to many reconstructed complete specimens. (Others include Dinosaur Provincial Park in Alberta, Canada, and Dinosaur National Monument in Utah, the United States.)
The museum at Lufeng in particular is truly awe-inspiring. The main display space is filled with more large dinosaur skeletons than you are ever likely to see amassed in one place. These are not models or casts, but carefully reconstructed, largely complete fossil skeletons of about 70 giant reptiles. They’re arranged in great herds and atmospherically lit from below, so some seem to float overhead as you wander among the columns beneath. Most of these skeletons are of early prosauropods such as Lufengosaurus, ancestors of the giant sauropods (such as Diplodocus and Diamantinasaurus) that would later reach lengths of more than 35 metres. The fossils displayed at Lufeng’s World Dinosaur Valley, about 60 kilometres from Yunnan’s capital Kunming, are the dinosaur equivalent of the Terracotta Army. To find even single genuine fossils on display in a museum rather than plaster casts of them is exciting, but when those fossils are largely complete and there are more than 70 of them, it’s nothing short of astounding.
The first written references to ‘dragon bones’ (very probably dinosaur fossils) in Chinese literature date to the Western Jin Dynasty (AD265–371), and refer to their location as the banks of a river in Sichuan. The Zigong Dinosaur Museum, 170 kilometres from Sichuan’s capital Chengdu, has more than 30 specimens from a cache of nearly 200 fossils (and 26 species of Jurassic dinosaur) dug up at Dashanpu Quarry.
The Lufeng, Zigong and Tianyu museums are well worth making the effort to visit if you are ever in China.
Fossils flowing overseas
Another element to the illegal Chinese fossil trade is the flow of important specimens overseas. In November 2010 the China Daily newspaper reported that, in the preceding three years, China had reclaimed more than 5000 fossil specimens from foreign countries, including Australia, the United States, Canada and Italy. A new law, which came into effect at the start of 2011, levied large fines against any person or organisation moving important fossils overseas without express permission from the authorities. Although there are a few exceptions, most major museums in Europe and the United States have strict rules about acquiring looted fossils. Specimens from China and Mongolia (from where it is also illegal to export them) nevertheless routinely turn up for sale overseas.
A number of high-profile cases of illegal fossil trading over the last few years have brought the issue to the attention of the media. There was a blaze of controversy in May 2012 when a largely complete skeleton of a Mongolian T. rex relative, Tarbosaurus bataar, appeared for sale at Heritage Auctions in New York. Before the auction, Mark Norell wrote an open letter arguing that the fossil was clearly from Mongolia’s Gobi Desert and must have been obtained illegally. Despite an injunction brought by US lawyers in the employ of the president of Mongolia – and a restraining order from a district court judge having been delivered to the auction house that day – the fossil was sold for just over US$1 million.
Norell is certainly in a position to know the fossil was from Mongolia. He’s been digging up fossils there for two decades, working alongside the Mongolian Academy of Sciences, and has authored more than 75 papers on his findings. ‘In my years in the desert I have witnessed ever-increasing illegal looting of dinosaur sites, including some of my own excavations’, he wrote in the letter:
These extremely important fossils are now appearing on the international market … There is no legal mechanism (nor has there been for over 50 years) to remove vertebrate fossil material from Mongolia. These specimens are the patrimony of the Mongolian people and should be in a museum in Mongolia.
Although the auction had gone ahead, the fossil was taken into custody on 22 June by US authorities, who seized it from a storage facility. ‘We are one step closer to bringing this rare … skeleton back home to the people of Mongolia’, said the president of Mongolia, Elbegdorj Tsakhia, in a statement released by his US lawyer. ‘Today we send a message to looters all over the world: We will not turn a blind eye to the marketplace of looted fossils.’
In a strange twist of fate, the leg bone of another Tarbosaurus specimen appeared in the window of London auction house Christie’s at around the same time. Christie’s is just a short stroll from the Natural History Museum, and so Paul Barrett spotted the fossil one day as he was walking past. Immediately suspicious as to its provenance, he wrote to Christie’s expressing his concerns. The auction house communicated this to the buyer and pulled the bone from sale.
Norell isn’t the only one to have noticed an insidious and growing problem. Phil Currie says he first realised that looting of fossils from protected sites was a serious issue in 2000, when specimens vanished from digs he had worked on for many years in Mongolia. ‘I was horrified to see that more than half a dozen skeletons of Tarbosaurus bataar, protected in situ by legislation for more than 30 years in the Gobi desert, had been ripped out of the ground’, he wrote in a column in New Scientist one month after the New York auction in 2012:
This was the beginning of a trend that each year saw more and more such sites desecrated … Poaching is as bad a problem to palaeontology as grave robbing is to archaeology. In addition to removing important specimens from their country of origin, the geographic and stratigraphic context of the fossils are lost, seriously compromising their scientific value.
Currie says Mongolian poachers go on the hunt for dinosaur remains that are exposed at the surface of rock faces, then often take a pick-axe to them and work their way through the skeleton until they find the claws and the teeth. In the process, they often destroy the rest of the specimen. Even if these fossils do end up in the hands of museums and academics rather than in private collections, they are next to useless, as the context in which they were found is invariably lost.
Though the Tarbosaurus skeleton that had been auctioned in New York was seized by US authorities in June 2012, the legal issues weren’t wrangled out until May 2013, when the fossil was returned to Mongolian officials. In a ceremony in a hotel across the street from the United Nations complex in New York, the dinosaur was symbolically handed back to Bolortsetseg Minjin, a Mongolian palaeontologist who had been involved in the fight to stop the auction going ahead, and Oyungerel Tsedevdamba, Mongolia’s minister of culture, sports and tourism.
The pair used the opportunity to announce that the fossil would be used as the founding exhibit for Mongolia’s first dinosaur museum, the Central Museum of Mongolian Dinosaurs, where Bolortsetseg would act as chief palaeontologist.
In a speech, the minister said that before the controversy over the Tarbosaurus remains, Mongolians were vaguely aware of their palaeontological heritage, but didn’t have any celebrity dinosaurs to rally around – a situation that was set to change with the fame generated by the skeleton. The creation of a national dinosaur museum and public interest and pride in its exhibits, as well as inspiration for a future generation of Mongolian palaeontologists, is at least a silver lining to the cloud of the looting controversy.
Meanwhile, Eric Prokopi, the Florida fossil dealer who had prepared the Tarbosaurus for sale and auctioned it in New York, has pleaded guilty to three charges of illegally importing fossils, and now faces up to 17 years in prison. He was in possession of a number of other illegally trafficked specimens, including duck-billed hadrosaurs, oviraptorids and more Tarbosaurus remains. All of these are to be returned to Mongolia, as are the remains that were on sale at Christie’s in London, which were sourced back to a British fossil dealer. To avoid litigation himself, that dealer agreed to ship a long list of other fossils back to the United States for return to Mongolia and display in the new museum.
In October 2013, the plot thickened when news sources reported that American actor Nicolas Cage had acquired another Prokopi Tarbosaurus skull in a 2007 Beverly Hills auction, paying US$276 000 to outbid fellow actor Leonardo DiCaprio. This fossil is also now likely to be impounded by the US authorities. In January 2014, US media reported that yet another Tarbosaurus skull had been seized from the home of a Wyoming fossil dealer.
The significant media interest in the Tarbosaurus cases and the illegal fossil dealing has a least brought the issue to wider public attention and should make it much more difficult to auction this kind of material in the future, but there’s still a long way to go.
Unravelling the Archaeoraptor hoax
After the Archaeoraptor fiasco that had proved so embarrassing for National Geographic, investigative journalist Lewis M Simons was brought in by the magazine’s then editor, Bill Allen, to investigate. Simons reported in the October 2000 edition that it was:
a tale of misguided secrecy and misplaced confidence, of rampant egos clashing, self-aggrandizement, wishful thinking, naive assumptions, human error, stubbornness, manipulation, backbiting, lying, corruption, and, most of all, abysmal communication. It’s a story in which none of the characters looks good.
The American part of the story began with the smuggling of a fossil from China to the United States, where it was presented for sale at a major fossil show in Tucson, Arizona, in February 1999. There it was discovered and purchased by Steven and Sylvia Czerkas, well-known palaeoartists and dinosaur enthusiasts who run a small dinosaur museum in Blanding, Utah. They raised the $80 000 required for the specimen from M Dale Slade, a backer and patron of the museum. The Czerkases were friends of Phil Currie, so they invited him to study the fossil and prepare a publication on it with them in a scientific journal. After an initial glance, Currie, who worked regularly with National Geographic, alerted editor Chris Sloan to the fossil. Sloan decided it was the perfect addition to a story on feathered dinosaurs he was writing.
In the November 1999 story that was later denounced, Sloan described his first look at the fossil: ‘I’ve seen feathered dinosaurs specimens, but what Stephen shows me takes my breath away. Its long arms and small body scream “Bird!” Its long, stiff tail – which under magnification erupts into a series of tiny support rods paralleling the vertebrae – screams “Dinosaur!”.’ Unbeknown to him at the time, this was because they were from completely different animals.
The Czerkases had hoped to display the fossil in Blanding and that it might be the making of their small museum, but Currie and Sloan persuaded them that in order for the fossil to be studied and for anything to be published on it, it must be returned to China after they were finished with it. Once this was agreed, Xu Xing became involved and was sent from Beijing to examine the specimen before its return to China’s IVPP.
Alarm bells started to ring when Timothy Rowe at the University of Texas started to examine the fossil using high resolution X-ray CT scans. These would allow the research team to examine the 3D structure of the fossil, which was set into a cracked slab of sandy-coloured stone. Rowe, a world expert on CT scanning fossils, argued that the specimen had been made from a number of different fossils, and most particularly that the tail did not belong to the body.
Currie agreed that he had some concerns, but the Czerkases refused to believe there was a serious problem with the fossil and they pushed on for publication. Ultimately, both Nature and Science refused to print a paper on the find. This left National Geographic in the awkward position of officially describing a new species, as their print cycle and media machine were already too far ahead to pull the story.
Xu eventually proved Archaeoraptor was a fake after happening upon the counter slab of the tail in an institute in China in early 2000. It was attached to the legs of an undescribed dromaeosaur. This proved that the tail belonged to another specimen entirely and had been arranged in a false position in the Archaeoraptor fossil.
Cue an extremely embarrassing retraction by National Geographic, which was then forced to launch an enquiry and bring Lewis M Simons on board to carry out a very detailed and open investigation into what had gone wrong. Phil Currie would later describe his involvement in this scandal as the ‘greatest mistake of my life’.
Subsequent detailed CT scans by Rowe ultimately revealed that Archaeoraptor was glued together from 88 different pieces of a number of different fossils. Significantly, two of those were species unknown to science, making the specimens very important in their own right. The tail was from Microraptor, then the smallest dinosaur ever discovered (see chapter 7), while the front half was a primitive bird that was subsequently named Yanornis in a 2002 Nature paper entitled ‘Archaeoraptor’s better half’.
‘Now that we know which pieces really do go back together properly and which do not, we can see that there is a new species of extinct bird present in the forgery and that it definitely deserves to be studied and described’, Rowe told the BBC. ‘The tail came from a different animal altogether, and it has already been described and named Microraptor. We may never know where the legs came from.’
Luis Chiappe says it’s puzzling how the description of Archaeoraptor ended up in print in National Geographic, as ‘the red flag for that one should have been raised long before it got to that point’. With hindsight it seemed obvious that the animal was a chimera of bird and dinosaur features, he says, but it was put together with great skill.
Xu says that much has changed since then. At the time a forgery such as this was not only unexpected, but also difficult to predict. It’s also likely that, in those early years following the discovery of Sinosauropteryx, the first feathered dinosaur, people were caught up in a wave of excitement and were perhaps less careful than they might otherwise have been.
‘If you look at the background, this is a very complicated story’, he says, adding that at many fossil sites in China it’s rare to find completely articulated specimens of dinosaurs and birds. ‘In most cases when we do fieldwork in Inner Mongolia, in Xinxiang, or other parts of the world, what you find very often is an incomplete skeleton … You see lots of bones on the surface and you collect those bones and go back to the lab. You need to figure out whether those bones are from one individual or from two individuals or from several individuals. That’s a part of the research process for a palaeontologist.’
Experts are much more wary of inconsistencies or anomalies in fossils these days, but 15 years ago the assumption might just have been that the specimen wasn’t assembled properly or had some elements that had been attached by mistake. ‘They prefer to believe that based on the size, the texture of the bones and things like that, they prefer to believe those elements are from the same individual, just assembled mistakenly’, Xu says. The assumption would certainly not have been that the fossil had been assembled with the deliberate intention of deceiving people.
‘At the time, in 1999, we were not really prepared to face the problem of composite or faked specimens’, Xu adds. ‘Today, if you see a specimen like that – especially if it’s from Liaoning – you will say, “Oh yes, this is definitely a fake specimen”, because you know that this is a really serious problem. But a decade ago, people were not prepared to understand and deal with the situation. Sometimes the fakes are not so easy to recognise, and you would rather believe it is something good but not perfect.’
China’s new fossil industry has appeared in the blink of an eye and its palaeontological community is still finding its feet, but if Chinese authorities and museums are going to maintain their credibility, they will have to tackle the problem of faked fossils and the trafficking of fossils overseas. A remarkable and ongoing series of finds has given us a window into a fabulously weird and unexpected world, but the trade in faked, manipulated and illegally obtained fossils has tainted what are otherwise spectacular collections.