The skull of Microraptor under white light (top) and Laser-Stimulated Fluorescence (bottom). The colour differences indicate changes in mineralogy, which means that this is a composite specimen.
Two examples of Johann Beringer’s ‘Lying Stones’. OUMNH T.23 (left) depicts slug-like creatures and OUMNH T.22 (right) depicts arrows and boomerang-like symbols.
William Henry Ireland’s purported letter from William Shakespeare to Anne Hathaway was one of his more popular forgeries.
The Grolier Codex, a Maya codex made of fig-bark paper, contains a Venus almanac and dates between AD 1021 and 1154. The document is currently held by the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City.
A nineteenthcentury painting by the Spanish Forger using oil on wood. Notice the cracks that help ‘age’ the painting, and the Spanish Forger’s signature ‘tells’ – the bow mouths, turnedout feet, and daring décolletage.
A manuscript page painted by the Spanish Forger on parchment. It is a full-page illustration of the Visitation, and was painted on the back of an authentic 15th-century antiphonal leaf (below). Notice the cutesy castles and lollipop-like trees – both Spanish Forger ‘tells.’
Antoine Lavosier (in goggles) operates his solar furnace. Lavoisier used this apparatus to burn diamonds in glass jars; tests of the products of combustion led him to show that diamonds are comprised solely of carbon.
Herbert Strong examines a laboratory-grown diamond, 1970.
The research team from General Electric responsible for creating laboratory-grown diamonds, 1955.
Stereograph of leafy banana trees housed in the Floral Hall at the Philadelphia Centennial in 1876.
Employee of the Bureau of Chemistry’s Phytochemical Laboratory using a distillation apparatus to concentrate the odorous constituents of apples and peaches.
Big Blue as she hangs in the Beaty Biodiversity Museum, University of British Columbia.
Hanging model of the Blue Whale in the Irma and Paul Milstein Family Hall of Ocean Life. Newspaper insert from the front page of the Columbus Dispatch, 8 March 1881.
Walruses as seen via Walrus Cam at Round Island, Alaska, 2018.
Disney’s 1958 film White Wilderness showed Brown Lemmings committing ‘mass suicide’ by jumping off a cliff, even though this was not a natural behaviour. A later investigation found this scene was completely staged.
Gilles Tosello’s workshop in Toulouse, creating parts of the Caverne du Pont d’Arc.
Painting walls in Caverne du Pont d’Arc to replicate those found in Chauvet Cave. Image extracted from the 2015 documentary film Les génies de la grotte Chauvet.
Peckham Rock by Banksy. This was a rogue installation placed surreptitiously in the British Museum by the artist in 2005. The piece was then loaned (back) to the museum as part of the I Object! exhibit in 2018.