Birdlike Dino Fossil Was Forged

March 28, 2001 -- Using high-powered X-rays that see through rock, scientists have unveiled how a fraudulent fossil purported to be a "missing link" between dinosaurs and birds was glued together from mortar and bits of fossil and stone.

Unveiled in October 1999, National Geographic magazine hailed the specimen, dubbed Archaeoraptor, as "a true missing link in the complex chain that connects dinosaurs to birds." Months later, the magazine said the fossil was a fraud after a Chinese paleontologist, Xing Xu, said he thought the fossil was a composite of different animals.

Now Xu and colleagues report in this week's journal Nature that X-ray computer scans show Archaeoraptor was artfully created from 88 fragments of rock and fossil in three layers.

A Piece of Work

The turkey-sized animal was said to have been found in China's Liaoning province by farmers. Many fossils from the Early Cretaceous period, 125 million years ago, have been unearthed in the area. After it was taken out of China, it appeared on the commercial market at the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show, where private collectors gather to buy and sell fossils.

Tim Rowe, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Texas and an author of the study, says the specimen was purchased for $80,000 by Stephen Czerkas, an artist who creates models of dinosaurs, although the creator of the fossil remains unknown. Czerkas did not return phone calls for comment on the study.

"It was built by someone who had training in the anatomy of birds and dinosaurs," Rowe says. "They purposely created an intermediary form." Rowe says many of the fossils at the Tucson show are fake, but that untrained collectors are often duped.

Scientists have debated for years whether birds descended from dinosaurs. Despite news of the forgery, many experts agree that modern birds evolved from dinosaurs.

'A Sea of Grout'

The computer scans revealed pieces of fossilized bone embedded in rock were pressed into a layer of grout, a synthetic glue, which was sandwiched from the other side by a large slab of stone, the study reports. The front end came from a single bird fossil that scientists say really is a new species, while the rear part of the fossil was a jigsaw built from at least four different specimens of dinosaur.

"By looking at the cross sections produced by the scanner, we could look at the edges and see how well they fit together," Rowe says. "We could see that some parts actually did fit together, but then we got to the tail and it was just swimming in a sea of grout."

The computer tomography produces layers of images that are pieced together to form a three dimensional image of the specimen. Rowe likens it to slices of bread that fit together to make a loaf.

"It's a tremendous tool," he says. "One of the reasons we scan these [fossils] is we are so interested in what is inside. No curator will allow us to break open the skull of a dinosaur fossil."