Archaeoraptor — a “missing link” glued together from two fossils

In October 1999, at a press conference in Washington and in the November issue of National Geographic, the magazine unveiled a small feathered fossil from Liaoning Province, China, hailed as a transitional creature linking ground-running dinosaurs to birds. It was informally christened Archaeoraptor liaoningensis. The fossil was not a single animal at all. It was a chimera — a composite assembled, largely with glue, from pieces of at least two different species and several specimens, joined on a slab to look like one body. Within months it stood exposed as one of the most embarrassing fakes in modern paleontology.

The exposure was swift and came from inside the science. The Chinese paleontologist Xu Xing, a co-describer of the specimen, grew suspicious and on 20 December 1999 emailed his collaborators that the fossil was a forgery; in early 2000 he located in a Chinese institution the counterslab of the tail, proving it belonged to a separate animal. CT scans by Timothy Rowe at the University of Texas had already shown the slab to be made of mismatched parts. The tail was eventually identified as that of the dromaeosaur later named Microraptor; the front half was a primitive bird subsequently named Yanornis. The “link” was an accident of adhesive.

The deeper failure was editorial, not geological. The manuscript describing the fossil had been rejected by both Nature and Science, the discipline’s leading journals, yet National Geographic — a popular magazine, not a peer-reviewed one — published the find anyway, written up by its own art editor, Christopher Sloan. The specimen had been smuggled out of China in violation of that country’s antiquities law, sold at the Tucson gem show in February 1999 for a reported 80,000 dollars to Stephen Czerkas of a private dinosaur museum in Utah, and rushed to print on a wave of excitement about the genuine, and genuinely revolutionary, feathered dinosaurs then emerging from Liaoning.

That last point is the irony the case is remembered for. The dinosaur–bird link Archaeoraptor was meant to dramatize is real; Liaoning’s authentic fossils have since confirmed it overwhelmingly. The forgery did not invent a false idea so much as fabricate a counterfeit of a true one, and in doing so it handed critics of the science a propaganda gift. National Geographic commissioned an outside investigation and published a candid post-mortem, “Archaeoraptor Fossil Trail,” by the journalist Lewis M. Simons, in October 2000.