AD 1997 44. PSEUDOPALEONTOLOGY
“ARCHAEORAPTOR”
Although we can determine beyond reasonable doubt how all organisms on the planet are related by common descent just by analyzing the diversity of animals in the living world, we can find out the details of their evolution only by looking at fossils. Most vertebrate fossils, the remains of the major group to which we humans belong, are the mineralized bones and teeth of ancient animals that were preserved after their death in accumulating sedimentary rocks and later exposed by erosion.
Due to the vagaries of this process, the vast majority of the fossils that paleontologists find as they prowl over ancient landscapes are isolated teeth, bits of jaw with a few teeth, or broken bones of the body skeleton. Only comparatively rarely will a fossil seeker discover a complete skull, and much more seldom yet an even semicomplete skeleton. Full skeletons, which encode disproportionately large amounts of information about extinct animals, are scarcer yet and are the vertebrate paleontologist’s Holy Grail.
Over the past several decades, China has become an important source of new vertebrate fossils—especially full skeletons preserved, flattened, in fine-grained sediments—that have filled in former gaps in our knowledge of the evolution of many groups. Recognizing the scientific importance of these fossils, the Chinese government long ago banned their export, declaring them a national resource.
However, most of the rocky exposures in China that yield such fossils occur on land farmed by impecunious peasants, who find selling fossils on the—regrettably large—black market a more lucrative source of income than raising the crops they have traditionally grown. In some places, bootlegging fossils has become a mini industry, even though such activities deprive science of the information those fossils contain, and crude excavation techniques lead to broken specimens and poor provenance data.
In the summer of 1997, while hacking away at early Cretaceous (~120 million-year-old) rocks in a shale quarry, a farmer in China’s northeastern Liaoning Province discovered, and accidentally fractured into numerous pieces, several fossil-bearing slabs of rock. He took his findings home, eventually gluing together many of the bits to make a commercially valuable semicomplete skeleton. A local dealer, the full extent of whose complicity is not known, obtained a fraudulent permit for the glued-together specimen and exported it to the United States, where it sold for $80,000 at a gem and mineral show.
The details are murky, but supposedly a farmer in the northeastern Chinese province of Liaoning found a rare fossil of a toothed bird. Smuggled out of China and sold to a private dinosaur museum, the fossil became the subject of a major announcement in National Geographic magazine. The specimen turned out to be a composite.
The buyer was Stephen Czerkas, director of a small dinosaur museum in Utah. Czerkas immediately recognized that the creature in the slab was unlike anything else yet discovered. Its upper body and thorax, replete with the impressions of wing feathers, looked like those of a very primitive toothed bird resembling the famous Archaeopteryx in shoulder structure, while its long, stiff tail was typical of a group of predatory dinosaurs known as dromaeosaurs.
When the fossil that had been christened Archaeoraptor liaoningensis was examined using high-resolution X-ray computed tomography (CT) scans, it was found to comprise eighty-eight separate pieces cobbled together from at least two, and possibly up to five, different individuals.
In quick succession Czerkas contacted the Canadian dinosaur expert Phil Currie and National Geographic, and in the November 1999 issue, with great fanfare but apparently not much deliberation, the magazine published an article by its reporter Christopher Sloan that called the specimen Archaeoraptor liaoningensis and lauded it as a “true missing link” between dinosaurs and birds.
By this time, though, the specimen had been sent to Tim Rowe at the University of Texas for high-resolution CT scanning. Rowe soon realized that the top of the slab, the part bearing the fossil bone, was a composite of many broken pieces. Some of these were originally from different slabs, and all had been grouted onto a single piece of shale below, to give the appearance of a single skeleton. In particular, the creature’s tail did not match with its abdomen, and the two legs were actually part-counterpart (squashed specimens like this one have top and bottom impressions) of the same single leg.
Both Currie and Czerkas showed up for the scanning, but for reasons that are unclear National Geographic did not immediately get wind of Rowe’s conclusion (independently backed up by the testimony of a preparator who had examined the fossil), and went ahead with its sensational article. The find was immediately picked up by the national media, with great fanfare.
The publication was immediately criticized by the Smithsonian’s Storrs Olson; but the major blow came in March 2000, when National Geographic inconspicuously published a brief letter from the Chinese expert Xu Xing, who had been brought in earlier to study the new specimen (which by then was destined to return to China, where it resides now).
Back home in China, Xu had been shown the counterpart impression of the Archaeoraptor tail (this time joined to a dromaeosaur body), and he immediately realized that “Archaeoraptor is a composite… a dromaeosaur tail and a bird body.” Originally Xu’s letter had said “fake” rather than “composite,” but eventually he diluted his statement. In the same month, the science journal Nature, originally intended as a vehicle for publishing the no-longer-missing “link,” carried instead an account of the deception, with Rowe, Xu, and Currie among its authors.
Finally, in October 2000, a deeply embarrassed National Geographic published an article it had commissioned from an independent investigator. This detailed a lamentable story of negligence, denial, and finger-pointing by most of those concerned—except for the original finder/fabricator(s), who remained anonymous. The report drew a definitive line under the story of “Archaeoraptor”—although not under the specimens concerned, which turned out to be important as representatives of new species of early bird and dromaeosaur, respectively.
Few come out of this unhappy story of scientific fraud with any credit, although despite some nefarious motives it is hard to demonstrate much malice such as that clearly involved in the earlier Piltdown forgery (see chapter 28, Fake Paleoanthropology). The dirt-poor finder probably wanted merely to maximize the market value of his illicit fossils, as doubtless did the dealer who sold the composite under the table; for the most part, the scientists showed negligence rather than bad faith, and while National Geographic was clearly not anxious to let the facts get in the way of a good story, once alerted to the fraud it acted quickly.
Of course, China emerges as a hotbed of local corruption, and as a source of fakes extending far beyond Vuitton handbags and Rolex watches. And in America there were inevitably those who cynically used the story to their own advantage: Richard Nixon’s onetime Watergate co-conspirator Charles Colson announced in his radio commentary that it was an “elaborate and deliberate hoax,” designed to hide a lack of “transitional forms” in the fossil record.
Ironically, though, it is science itself that emerges best, having in this instance corrected itself very quickly—thanks partly to very recently developed technologies, although Xu’s intervention showed the enduring value of good old-fashioned brain work. The speed with which Archaeoraptor was dispatched contrasted gratifyingly with the fifty years it had taken to expose its Piltdown precursor.