The Glue That Broke Flying Dinosaur’s Back

When the smuggled stone slab first surfaced at a Tucson mineral show, it seemed the likely key to a mystery of evolution.

To the collector who paid $80,000 for it, the Chinese fossil had every appearance of a feathered dinosaur that flew like a modern bird. The purported missing link made headlines when National Geographic trumpeted the find in 1999, then caused red faces when it was revealed as a forgery a year later.

Researchers in China and at the American Museum of Natural History in New York now have completely deciphered the deception.

The find wrongly hailed as a crucial link between the dinosaurs and the birds actually does contain fossils of a dinosaur and a bird. But the only connection between them is glue.

In a study published recently in the journal Nature, the researchers revealed that the major part of the doctored fossil belongs to an ancient, fish-eating bird called Yanornis martini. Its lizard-like tail belongs to a small, carnivorous dinosaur previously identified as Microraptor zhaoianus. Both creatures lived and died more than 110 million years ago.

The scandal over the Archaeoraptor fossil, as the forgery was named, highlights the problem of illegal traffic in specimens from one of the world’s most important fossil beds in China -- and the simmering tensions between amateur collectors and the scientists who covet such bones.

“The controversy over the forged Archaeoraptor is an alarm to all paleontologists,” said Zhonghe Zhou at Beijing’s Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, who led the research team that identified the Yanornis bones. “First, we had better not buy and study illegally exported specimens; second, something can indeed be too good to be true.”

Working with Julia A. Clarke at the American Museum of Natural History, Zhou compared the front half of the forged fossil with the only two known specimens of the long-extinct bird. The researchers compared more than 200 features to pinpoint the creature’s true identity.

“We’ve presented the missing piece to the puzzle,” said Clarke, who specializes in studying the relationships between fossils. “It really looks like Yanornis. That combination is unique.”

Suspicions about these bones of contention were first confirmed when X-ray analysis revealed that the fossil was a mosaic made from 88 fragments of rock and fossil leaved together in three layers and glued to a single supporting slab of shale. Grout had been used to fill any gaps.

As best as anyone can tell, the fossils had been unearthed in an illegal dig in northern China in 1997 at one of the most spectacular fossil beds of modern paleontology. The deposits of volcanic and sedimentary rock in Liaoning province have yielded a trove of unusually well-preserved fossils of feathered dinosaurs.

So far, there has been no suggestion that anyone forged the fossil as a hoax to deliberately mislead scientists, as was the case with the infamous Piltdown Man.

In that 1912 incident, a researcher deliberately altered a set of human and orangutan bones to make them seem to be remains from the same creature, then buried them in an English quarry. When they were dug up, they were hailed as a missing link between ape and modern mankind. The hoax distorted scientific ideas on the descent of man for almost 40 years.

In the same way, the discovery of the Archaeoraptor forgery was a twist in a scientific dispute over the origin of birds.

Publicity compounded the problem, turning the volatile mix of paleontology and profit into something more toxic to sound science. The popular press had embraced a specimen that seemed almost too good to be true, without waiting for formal scientific confirmation, several researchers said.

When the fossil find was made public, it did help buttress the argument that birds are the direct descendants of carnivorous Theropod dinosaurs such as Tyrannosaurus rex.

When it was revealed as a fake, however, it then served to discredit the theory by calling into doubt the veracity of other fossils from China that document the link between dinosaurs and modern birds. Moreover, the fraud was exploited by religious fundamentalists eager to undermine any evidence of evolution.

“Scientifically, it was a bump,” said Philip Currie, curator of dinosaurs at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller, Canada. “There were a lot of uncomfortable feelings and a lot of accusations kicked around.”

In this case, experts are confident that nothing more than the profit motive was at work.

Several scientists suspect that a local farmer glued the fragments together simply to create a more presentable -- and potentially more lucrative -- specimen for the thriving black market in fossils. Chinese authorities have struggled in vain for years to control the region’s illegal traffic in fossils.

“It was not a hoax, just poor judgment,” said Kevin Padian, an expert on avian evolution at the University of California Museum of Paleontology in Berkeley.

“I don’t think for a minute the villagers were trying to fool anyone. They are not scientists. They see that a nice specimen fetches more money. If they enhance it a bit, it just looks better.”

Other Chinese fossils of down-covered dinosaurs soon were discovered, however, that filled the evolutionary gap that Archaeoraptor had pretended to bridge.

As for the fossil fragments that went into the $80,000 forgery, they have been returned to China, where researchers now estimate their value at $1 million.