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Piltdown Man
Photograph by Maurice Ambler, Picture Post/Getty Images
In 1912 scientists thought they'd discovered the elusive missing link between human and ape. Found in a gravel pit in Piltdown, England, a set of intriguing skull and jaw fragments were later reconstructed by the British Museum into a human-like head with an ape-like jaw.
In 1953 it turned out the find wasn't proof of anything—other than the skill of the still anonymous forger. The skull was a medieval human's. The jaw was an orangutan's. And the teeth were a chimp's.
Above, Alvan T. Marston, a Piltdown debunker, shows how a chimpanzee's teeth match up.
Published March 31, 2009
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Cardiff Giant
Photograph courtesy Farmers Museum via Associated Press
In 1869 an astounding find was unearthed by a farmer and a cigar maker: a ten-foot-tall (three-meter-tall), 3,000-pound (1,360-kilogram) stone man buried near Cardiff, New York. The massive statue was an obvious hoax—experts said the giant, sculpted from gypsum, was of undoubtedly recent provenance. But the brothers made a bundle charging tourists 50 cents to view the "Cardiff Giant" nonetheless.
Published March 31, 2009
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Archaeoraptor
Photograph by O. Louis Mazzatenta
It's true that dinosaurs are related to birds. But one purported missing link turned out to be foul play. Archaeoraptor liaoningensis, a birdlike creature with the tail of a carnivorous dinosaur, was featured in National Geographic magazine and displayed at the National Geographic Society in Washington, D.C., in 1999.
But like Piltdown Man, the find proved too good to be true. What's now dubbed the Piltdown Chicken was a composite of fossils from two different creatures. National Geographic confirmed the mistake in April 2000. (The National Geographic Society owns National Geographic News.)
Published March 31, 2009
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Bigfoot
Photograph from AP
Massive footprints in the snow spooked miners in the 1920s, who feared Sasquatch, or Bigfoot, was on their trail. But retired logger Rant Mullens admitted in 1982 that he'd helped perpetrate the legend by stamping giant footprints in the snow of Washington's Mount St. Helens using the carved wooden "feet" seen above.
On the right, a boy in 1975 holds a plaster cast his father, Mark Pettinger, believed to be a Sasquatch footprint found in Puyallup, Washington. Hoax—or not?
Published March 31, 2009
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