Piltdown Man

Perhaps the most notorious fraud in the search for a "missing link" (which is a misnomer, by the way) was the Piltdown Man. Charles Dawson, who proclaimed the find in 1912, was rather, shall we say, eccentric. The non-credentialed paleontologist and anthropologist had plenty of discoveries under his belt, ranging from valid to fallacious to outright frauds, before Piltdown rocked the world.

There's plenty of reasons to be suspicious of any claimed "missing link," and that's especially true for a skull found in a quarry in the United Kingdom, far from the source of the great apes in Africa. Dawson proclaimed the Piltdown man fell somewhere between apes and humans.

Not so much. It turned out in the end that Piltdown was a great ape, but a 1953 investigation conducted long after Dawson's death revealed it to be a modern ape bleached and artificially weathered to look like a 500,000-year-old jawbone. Research from 2010 suggests that Dawson acted alone in the fraud.