Beringer’s Lying Stones — carved fakes planted to humble a proud professor

In 1726, at the University of Würzburg in Franconia, the physician and professor Johann Bartholomäus Adam Beringer published a lavish book illustrating some two hundred remarkable “fossils” he believed had been dug from a hillside called Mount Eibelstadt. The stones showed lizards, frogs, spiders in their webs, birds, comets, the sun and moon, and even Hebrew letters spelling the name of God. None of it was real. The objects were soft limestone carved by hand and planted for Beringer to find — a hoax aimed squarely at a man his colleagues judged insufferably arrogant. The volume, Lithographiae Wirceburgensis, is one of the most famous self-inflicted disasters in the history of science.

The deception was the work of two university colleagues: Johann Ignatz Roderick, a professor of geography and mathematics, and Johann Georg von Eckhart, the court librarian and privy councillor. By their own later admission and the surviving court record, they resented Beringer’s conceit and contrived to ruin it by feeding him exactly the marvels his theories craved. Their instrument was one of Beringer’s own diggers, the seventeen-year-old Christian Zänger, who planted the carved stones where the professor and his other two boys — the brothers Niklaus and Valentin Hehn — would unearth them.

According to the durable tradition, the hoax undid itself when stones began to appear bearing Beringer’s own name, a flourish too pointed to be nature’s. Realizing he had been deceived, Beringer took the matter to law. The Würzburg records show a hearing before the Cathedral Chapter on 13 April 1726 and municipal proceedings on 15 April and 11 June 1726, in which the conspirators were examined. The fraud destroyed the careers of its perpetrators — Roderick left Würzburg and Eckhart his standing — but it did not spare its victim, whose name has been attached ever since to credulous, wishful science.

What makes the case endure is not the crudeness of the carvings but the sophistication of the self-deception. Beringer was not stupid; he was a learned man whose theoretical commitments and vanity led him to read manufactured nonsense as evidence for a cherished idea — that some fossils were not the remains of organisms at all but figures impressed in stone by a “formative force” or the hand of God. The Lying Stones, the Lügensteine, remain the textbook warning that a clever mind defending a beloved hypothesis can be the easiest of all to fool. Beringer reportedly tried to buy back every copy of his book; he died about a decade later, in 1738.