In their attempts to understand more about our world, a lot of good people made a lot of honest mistakes. Other "mistakes" weren't so honest, but were the result of unchecked greed for money and fame. Here are just a few.

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Year: 1696

Con artist: Cornelius Meyer

Originally published in: Nuovi ritrovamenti Divisi in Due Parti

Now appears in: "Investigation of a Claim of a Late-Surviving Pterosaur and Exposure of a Taxidemic Hoax: The Case of Cornelius Meyer's Dragon" by Phil Senter and Pondanesa D. Wilkins in Palaeontologia Electronica

By the late 17th century, residents around Rome had long suffered flooding from local rivers. Rather than blaming floodplain topography, though, they tended to blame serpentine monsters believed to slither around the watery depths. A Dutch engineer named Cornelius Meyer knew how to solve the actual problem of flooding by building levees, but the workers he depended on were skittish. Legends told of a dragon living in the region. It has supposedly been killed years earlier, but new rumors claimed it was once again alive, and no one wanted to run into it at the work site. To get his workers moving, Meyer rather miraculously "recovered" the dead dragon, and later described it in his book, Nuovi ritrovamenti Divisi in Due Parti. Meyer may have cut some ethical corners, but the reliably dead dragon allowed the work to proceed. He probably could not have imagined how his dragon engraving would be appropriated as evidence centuries later. Around the turn of the 21st century, biblical literalists argued that Meyer's engraving really showed a pterosaur, specifically Scaphognathus crassirostris. Its presence in a 17th-century engraving "proved" that pterosaurs did not, as the science community claimed, go extinct tens of millions of years before humans evolved, but in fact lived through the Renaissance. Unfortunately for the pterosaur-seeing creationists, the engraving they cited was, although a hoax, meticulously detailed. It was so detailed that a reexamination published in 2013 did more than demonstrate that Meyer's dragon bore no resemblance to Scaphognathus crassirostris. By comparing the engraving to living and fossil species, the 2013 study authors figured out what Meyer probably cobbled together to make his monster. Senter and Wilkins concluded, "The skull of Meyer's dragon is that of a dog. The mandible is that of a second, smaller dog. The ribs are those of a large fish. The thoracic vertebrae probably are those of a beaver. The 'hind limbs' are the forelimbs of a juvenile bear. The wings, tail, beak, and cranial horn are fake." Dragon "skin" conveniently hid the junctures of the different parts.

Year: 1939

Originally appeared in: "Thunder in his Footsteps" by Roland T. Bird in Natural History

Now appears in: "History of Science: Fossil Proboscidians and Myths of Giant Men" by James L. Hayward in Transactions of the Nebraska Academy of Sciences (Also discussed in Quest for the African Dinosaurs by Louis Jacobs)

The worst thing about this hoax is how many people still fall for it. In the 1930s, American Museum paleontologist Roland T. Bird paid a visit to the Paluxy River limestone beds near Glen Rose, Texas, to see a spectacular dinosaur trackway. Bird's visit came during the Depression, and some locals decided to sell tracks from the region in hopes of making some much needed cash. They quickly figured out it would be easier to carve footprints than dig up the real things, and that it would be more interesting to carve giant human footprints than dinosaur tracks. A fraud is a glowing success when it tells people what they want to believe, and many biblical literalists embraced this so-called evidence that humans and dinosaurs coexisted. Truth is, we missed each other by about 65 million years.

Year: 1845

Con artist: "Dr." Albert Koch

Originally published in: Hydrarchos

Now appears in: Monsters of the Sea by Richard Ellis

This illustration accompanied Albert Koch's description of a "gigantic fossil reptile" 114 feet long. In truth, Koch pieced together the bones of five fossil whales, then showed the specimen in the U.S. and in England. The hoax was exposed on both sides of the Atlantic.

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Year: c. 1842

Con artist: "Dr." Albert Koch

Originally published as: Missouri Leviathan

Now appears at: The British Museum Collection (https://www.britishmuseum.org/ collection/object/P_1871-0812-5359) (Also discussed in American Monster by Paul Semonin)

Working his way up to a sea monster, Albert Koch toured both sides of the Atlantic with an alleged leviathan. Around 1840, a Missouri farmer found an assemblage of mastodon bones. Koch quickly won the rights to excavate. The bones were absolutely real, but instead of assembling multiple individuals, Koch cobbled the bones together to conjure a proboscidean far bigger than any known mastodon. Although mastodons were roughly the size of Indian elephants, Koch's Missouri Leviathan, with its tusks splayed sideways, towers over the modern animal.

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Year: 1937

Con artist: Tony Sarg

Now appears in: The Nantucket Sea-Serpent Hoax (1937) in Public Domain Review

In the summer of 1937, Nantucket newspapers began to carry stories of giant footprints, perhaps left by a sea serpent, on a local beach. The area had a long history of sea serpent sightings, and maybe some of the more excitable local minds pondered the possibility that a fabled monster had finally come ashore. W. Reid Blair, director of the New York Zoological Society and recipient of the serpent's alleged footprint photos, dashed their hopes. A marine mammal, he explained, would have moved mostly on its belly, leaving an indentation on the beach rather than distinct prints. But within days, there was a big monster on the beach. Local puppeteer Tony Sarg was behind the footprint hoax, and he followed up with a giant balloon of a sea monster. His sea monster enjoyed weeks of popularity in Nantucket before slithering off to New York's Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. As hoaxes go, this one was short-lived and fairly benign.

Year: 1934

Con artists: Marmaduke Wetherell and Robert Kenneth Wilson

Now appears in: Abominable Science! by Loxton and Prothero

Scotland's Loch Ness Monster legend, which had waxed and waned for centuries, gained new momentum in 1933 when a road was completed around the northern shore of Loch Ness. Alleged sightings as the year progressed prompted the Daily Mail to investigate in December. The newspaper sent a team that included purported big game hunter Marmaduke Wetherell, who claimed to find footprints along the shore soon after arriving. "I am aware that it is suggested that I have had phenomenal luck in finding such definite traces in two days, although others have failed after a long search," Wetherell piously announced. He sent casts of the footprints to zoologists at London's Natural History Museum, and Nessie believers breathlessly waited for confirmation. Returning from their Christmas holiday, the zoologists disappointed. They reported that the footprints looked remarkably like those of a hippo — not surprising since the stuffed hippo foot Wetherell likely used was still in his grandson's possession after the turn of the 21st century, Loxton and Prothero explain. Having failed to win the day with fake footprints, Wetherell went on to make a fake monster, attaching a small sea monster model to a toy submarine. He then recruited a "respectable" doctor, Robert Kenneth Wilson, to claim credit for what became known as the Surgeon's Photograph. The hoax was revealed by Wetherell's son Ian in 1975. The famous version of the Surgeon's Photograph was closely cropped to mask the scale, but this photo shows a wider area. On April 21, 2015, Google commemorated the hoax with a Doodle showing a monster-headed submarine powered by little aliens. Even with the hoax exposed, fervent belief in Nessie has persisted for decades, despite the utter lack of physical evidence. Yet Wetherell had plenty of detractors from the start, including BBC producer Peter Fleming, who remembered the big game hunter as "a dense, fruity, pachydermatous man in pepper-and-salt tweeds."

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Year: 1997

Con artist: Unidentified Chinese fossil collector (who might not have known he was defrauding anyone)

Originally published in: National Geographic Magazine, November, 1999 issue

For more information: National Geographic Magazine, October, 2000 issue (Photo by O. Louis Mazzatenta), Nature Magazine, February 17, 2000 issue, Unearthing the Dragon by Norell and Ellison

In 1997, a Chinese farmer found an exquisite birdlike fossil with faint feather impressions. A couple yards away, he found a lizard-like fossil tail. He took these and other finds home, glued the pieces together, then sold the result to a local dealer. To the farmer, it looked like a nice, complete fossil, which would bring him a little more money than shattered pieces. To less-than-careful eyes, the composite looked like a missing link between dinosaurs and birds. Over the next two years, the composite fossil made its way into the hands of a loose association of amateur dinosaur enthusiasts, professional paleontologists and National Geographic editors. With unprecedented achievement in lousy communication, various members of this group purchased the fossil for $80,000, insured it for $1.6 million, proudly announced the new species Archaeoraptor liaoningensis, then eventually wished they'd never seen the little fossil. Added to the embarrassment was the near certainty that it had been illegally smuggled out of China, a fact which — to its credit — National Geographic insisted be remedied before it agreed to publish the find. (The fossil was eventually repatriated.) The original plan was to describe the fossil in a peer-reviewed publication — a contingency that National Geographic gambled on — but after the paper was rejected by both Nature and Science , National Geographic didn't have time to pull the article. The magazine ignored its policy of awaiting publication in a peer-reviewed paper and announced the find. Just a few months later, Xu Xing, a collaborator in the research announced the bad news, and confirmed what a few others had quietly suspected: The fossil was a composite. In fact, it was a composite of 88 pieces. Finger pointing ensued. Creationists loved it. But as paleontologist Mark Norell has pointed out, the fossil never passed peer review, and the scientists involved revealed the forgery.

Year: 1842

Con artist: P.T. Barnum

Originally published in: New York Herald

Now appears in: Monsters of the Sea by Richard Ellis (Also discussed in The Feejee Mermaid by Jan Bondeson)

P.T. Barnum's skillful manipulation convinced thousands to see his "Feejee Mermaid." It was displayed for "positively one week only!" at a concert hall on Broadway. Years later, Barnum recounted with amusement how he had lured the crowds to see an "ugly, dried-up, black-looking specimen about three feet long . . . that looked like it had died in great agony."

A generation earlier, on the other side of the Atlantic, the mermaid enjoyed similar notoriety. An American captain named Samuel Barrett Eades purchased the mermaid in 1822, paying for the prize by selling the ship he was supposed to sail. The ship's real owner, Stephen Ellery, was hardly amused. Ellery hired William Clift, a talented anatomist and zoologist, to examine the specimen. Clift found the mermaid was a skillful forgery incorporating the head on an orangutan, the teeth of a baboon, artificial eyes, and likely the tail of a salmon. Eades didn't welcome this news, and later hired his own "experts" to assure him the mermaid was genuine. After entertaining crowds of Londoners, the mermaid fell into obscurity for two decades before Barnum bought it.

Year: 1860

Con artist: P.T. Barnum

Originally published in: Newspaper advertisement

Now appears in: The Book that Changed America by Randall Fuller

Barnum embarked on a long career of false advertising in 1835, when he exhibited a former slave, Joice Heth, claiming she was 161 years old, and George Washington's former wet nurse. With his What-is-it?, Barnum entered a whole new arena. Not too far across town, French naturalist Paul Du Chaillu was exhibiting his gorilla specimens, and Barnum didn't like to be out-spectacled. So he advertised a chimeric creature, with the anatomy of an orangutan, but the "countenance of a human being!" In fact, the actual human being on display bore little resemblance to this illustration. His name was Willian Henry Johnson, and he was 18 years old. The sixth child of desperately poor former slaves, Johnson might have had microcephaly, but this is far from certain. The condition is associated with a short life expectancy, but Johnson performed for Barnum for another 60 years, ultimately dying in 1926. However humiliating his work for Barnum might have been, Johnson was at least well paid, and died the owner of a big savings account and several houses.

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Year: 1763

Con artist: Correspondent of Buffon

Originally published in: Histoire Naturelle

Now appears in: "Sloth Bones and Anteater Tongues" by Helen Cowie in Atlantic Studies

Like his predecessors, Buffon often relied on the kindness of amateur naturalists. Nature lovers living overseas would sometimes send him descriptions and even specimens of new plants and animals that he could describe in his books. But not all correspondents were honorable, and a clever con artist could even fool a skilled naturalist. Buffon described the "striped tamandua" in Histoire Naturelle and the hoax wasn't unveiled until after his death. He had really been sent a coati, a raccoon relative. The fabricator had removed the animal's teeth and given it stripes.

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Now appears in: Fossils: Evidence of Vanished Worlds by Yvette Gayrard-Valy and The Floating Egg by Roger Osborne

For many years, the ground in the village of Whitby, England was strewn with baffling objects vaguely resembling coiled snakes. Local legend explained that years earlier, the area was crawling with snakes which St. Hilda (Abbess of the Whitby Abbey) beheaded and turned to stone. This coat of arms of the town of Whitby recalls that legend. In less benign tributes to the legend, locals "found" the original snake heads and reattached them to the snakes, then (not surprisingly) sold them. In fact, the heads were skillfully carved from stone. And the snakes? They are really fossil ammonites that went extinct at the same time as the dinosaurs.

Now appears in: Fossils: Evidence of Vanished Worlds by Yvette Gayrard-Valy

This is an example of a snake turned to stone, better known as a snake stone. It appears to be a small snake curled neatly around its tail. Whoever "reattached" the head to this creature was very skillful; the spot where the carved snake head was attached to the ammonite really can't be detected. That this skillful forgery has been preserved to the present day suggests that it was highly valued.

Now appears in: "Ammonites, Legends, and Politics: The Snakestones of Hilda of Whitby" by Alfred Kracher in European Journal of Science and Theology

In 1926, Edmund New designed this bookplate for St. Hilda's College, Oxford. The bookplate featured the saint holding an ammonite while standing on a snake, the origin of snake stone legends now clearly understood. In his article, Kracher argues that perhaps a clear intent to deceive with carved heads attached to ammonites didn't actually arise before the late 18th century, around the time when Walter Scott's poem Marmion popularized the legend of St. Hilda for a new generation, and the snake stones became gimmicks for tourists. Before then, ammonites, even without heads attached, might have been prized by locals for their association with the saint. The Irish story of Patrick — another saint credited with eradicating snake — might have actually been a metaphorical story of how Patrick displaced pagan druids, many of whom might have sported snake tattoos.

Year: 1726

Con artists: J. Ignatz Roderick and Georg von Eckhart

Originally published in: Lithographiae Wirceburgensis

Now appears in: The Lying Stones of Marrakech by Stephen Jay Gould

In the early 18th century, Johann Bartholomew Adam Beringer, a professor and physician from Würzburg, published a book documenting "fossil" finds from a nearby mountain. His finds included everything from spiders on their webs to lizards with their skins intact. Legend has it that Beringer was the object of a joke by his students, but he was actually defrauded by two of his colleagues. When Roderick and Eckhart learned that Beringer intended to publish his finds, they nervously warned him that the fossils were fake, but by then Beringer was a man with a purpose. Although Beringer mistakenly assumed the fossils were natural, not carved, he refused to speculate any further, instead publishing his finds for others to analyze. Based on today's understanding of fossils, Beringer's mistake seems remarkably stupid. In his time, however, the process of fossilization was poorly — if at all — understood. Whether fossils were organic in nature or the results of the same forces that made rocks themselves was not yet known.

Year: 1726

Con artists: J. Ignatz Roderick and Georg von Eckhart

Originally published in: Lithographiae Wirceburgensis

Now appears at: AMS Historica (http://amshistorica.unibo.it/3)

In his "fossil" book, Johann Bartholomew Adam Beringer illustrated the specimens he found — carvings left for him by hoaxers. This plate portion shows lizards and/or amphibians with soft tissue preserved. The specimen at the top peers at the reader with winsome eyes turned to stone. The specimen below that bears little resemblance to anything in the animal kingdom. It apparently sports a canine head on one end of its body and a human- or monkey-like head on the other. The simian face grins, as if amused by the prank played on the hapless Beringer.

Year: 1726

Con artists: J. Ignatz Roderick and Georg von Eckhart

Originally published in: Lithographiae Wirceburgensis

Now appears at: AMS Historica (http://amshistorica.unibo.it/3)

This plate from Johann Bartholomew Adam Beringer's book includes more illustrations of fossils that could not exist, but in the middle of all the perfectly preserved eyes and innocent smiles, some so-called fossils look plausible: shells. Under the right conditions, shells can fossilize readily. But draped over them is another fantastical creature. These carvings, with their representations of things that could and could not fossilize underscores the difficulty common in Beringer's day of understanding not just how fossils formed but what they even were.

Year: 1911

Originally appeared in: Several hundred publications

Now appears in: Human Origins: The Search for Our Beginnings by Herbert Thomas (Also discussed in Dry Store Room No. 1 by Richard Fortey, and discussed in detail in The Piltdown Forgery by J.S. Weiner)

Perhaps the best known case of scientific fraud, the Piltdown Man was believed to be the earliest-known human from Western Europe. In fact, it was the jaw of an ape (with filed teeth) paired with a human skull. Amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson collected a skull fragment in 1911, and claimed that workmen digging in the gravel pit where the fragment was found had given him another piece years earlier. More excavations turned up more material. Skeptics who suspected that the skull and jaw came from two different animals were flummoxed at the 1915 find of a second individual (Piltdown II) two miles away. Many (planted) animal fossils from the area corroborated Piltdown Man. The Piltdown forgery was far from amateurish; the perpetrator(s) understood human and ape anatomy, fossils of "contemporary" fauna, and even the gravel beds where the fossils were collected. It wasn't until 1953 that three scientists (Sir Wilfrid Le Gros Clark, Kenneth Oakley and Joseph Weiner) uncovered the hoax. Even now, the perpetrator is unknown. Suspects include English anatomist Sir Arthur Keith and British Museum employee Martin Hinton. Some speculation has even fingered Sir Arthur Conan Doyle of Sherlock Holmes fame, although most suspicion has settled on Charles Dawson. Exposure of the Piltdown fraud helped pave the way for acceptance of genuine hominid fossils, such as Raymond Dart's Australopithecus africanus, whose implications (evolution of bipedalism before big brains) had been "disproved" by Piltdown.

Year: 1912

Now appears in: The Science of Human Evolution by John Langdon

Even paired with a human cranium, Piltdown's ape jaw would have been easy for an anatomist to identify if the teeth had been left in their natural condition. The hoaxer filed down the molar surfaces to prevent such a straightforward identification. What eventually became clear was that natural wear on primate molars would have looked different from the striations on teeth smoothed by a metal file. It's easy to chuckle at the people fooled by Piltdown, especially artifacts as seemingly obvious as a prehistoric cricket bat. But John Langdon doesn't characterize the victims of the Piltdown hoax as fools, or even as people blinded by their own prejudices — though he acknowledges the role of nationalism in the buildup to World War I. Besides promoting British pride in a human ancestor found on British soil, World War I helped perpetuate the Piltdown hoax in another way; the war delayed foreign scientists' access to the fossil by several years. In fact, Piltdown attracted its skeptics from the start, but as Langdon writes, "science cannot reject valid data." Over the next few decades, as evidence of human ancestors began to accumulate from sites in Africa and the Levant, paleoanthropologists willing to consider all the data had a tougher time figuring out where Piltdown's Dawn Man fit. Finds from Mount Carmel eventually convinced Sir Arthur Keith that "the large brain of Piltdown was a precocious sideshow at best." In short, Langdon writes of Piltdown's academic victims, "One might say there was a fatal combination of bad luck and a naive reluctance to imagine malice."

Year: 1913

Scientist: William Plane Pycraft

Artist: Amadée Forestier

Published in: The Popular Science Monthly

Image provided by: The Internet Archive

The orangutan jaw and human cranium found at Piltdown, East Sussex, was quickly named Eoanthropus dawsoni. This reconstruction appeared in The Popular Science Monthly two years after the forged fossil turned up in the quarry. The periodical described the find as "rivaling in importance the discovery of Pithecanthropus erectus in Java" and reported, "The cranium is fragmentary, but typically human, with a capacity of over a thousand cubic centimeters, indicating a brain about four fifths that of the average European and twice as large as that of the highest apes." In 1913, paleoanthropologists still felt the need to use specifically European brains as benchmarks. The article went on to describe the jaw, stating that it somewhat resembled the Heidelberg jaw as well as the jaw of a chimp. The Popular Science Monthly reproduced Forestier's "fanciful reconstruction of the primitive man" originally published in Illustrated London News , and Pycraft's more sober restoration of the jaw. Speculation on who perpetrated the Piltdown hoax hasn't accused Pycraft. It's fairly safe to say that he and Forestier weren't perpetrators of the Piltdown hoax but were instead among its victims.

Year: 1914

Originally published in: Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London

Now appears in: Dry Store Room No. 1 by Richard Fortey

Of the evidence supposedly corroborating Piltdown Man, the most ridiculous had to be what Charles Dawson and Arthur Smith Woodward described as a "bone implement." What looked like a bone implement to them looked — to more discerning eyes — like a cricket bat. So outlandish was this piece of evidence that some historians have speculated this was an attempt to expose the entire hoax. If so, it didn't work. Dawson and Woodward published a paper about it.

Year: 1934

Artist: Margaret Flinsch

Now appears at: Piltdown Man and the Dualist Contention (http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/ tetrapod-zoology/ piltdown-man-and-the- dualist-contention/)

Piltdown Man (Eoanthropus dawsoni) would not be definitively debunked until nearly 20 years after Flinsch produced this illustration, but multiple scientists had expressed their doubts about the find starting soon after it was announced. As early as 1913, David Waterston, an anatomist at King's College, argued that the jaw could not belong to a human. Two years later, Gerrit Smith Miller, a mammal curator at the Smithsonian Institution, published a well-researched rebuttal of Piltdown, showing that a chimp jaw, when broken in just the right spots, looked just like the alleged jaw of Eoanthropus dawsoni. Marcellin Boule, a French paleontologist, and Franz Weidenreich, a German anthropologist, both disputed Piltdown Man's legitimacy in 1923. Martin Hinton of the British Museum also claimed that he knew right away that the find was bogus, but Hinton has also been identified as one of the potential perpetrators of the hoax.

What's especially ironic about Flinsch's illustration is that it shows one of the reconstructed fossil men of Sussex wielding a tool resembling the one that Charles Dawson and Arthur Smith Woodward published a paper on in 1914, i.e., the tool that looks remarkably like a cricket bat.

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Year: c. 1920

Artist: Aimé Rutot

Distributor: Keystone View Company

Now appears in: Seven Skeletons by Lydia Pyne

The Belgian artist Aimé Rutot created one of the most popular reconstructions of Piltdown Man in the 1910s. In the 1920s, Keystone View Company produced and distributed stereoscope view cards of the reconstruction. Combining two very slightly offset photos of the same object, intended to be viewed through a special visor, stereoscopic images could provide the illusion of three-dimensionality. It just wasn't a three-dimensional image of anything that had ever actually lived.

Year: 1911

Con artist: Wilhelm Rappe

Now appears in: "A Chimpanzee Skull in the Devil's Cave" by Oliver Hochadel in Endeavour

Shortly before Piltdown humiliated British scientists, a similar hoax embarrassed German scientists. Near the small towns of Steinau and Schlüchtern, locals had been exploring a cave known as Devil's Cave, or Teufelshöhle, since 1905. Overseeing the excavations — with an eye toward putting the region on the tourist map — was Albert Lüders, and he presided over an association devoted to exploring the cave. But one member of the association, an apothecary named Wilhelm Rappe, apparently liked a good joke, especially if Lüders was the butt of it. Rappe's brother had been to Cameroon and reportedly shot a bunch of chimpanzees. Rappe fished a chimpanzee skull out of his brother's collection, darkened it with chemical treatments and fire to make it look really old, and planted it in the cave when the workmen weren't paying close attention. In fact, they were paying even less attention than Rappe guessed because the skull he planted got tossed into a rubble heap after it lost its mandible and someone severed its nose with a spade. Those mishaps only strengthened the hoax by making the chimpanzee skull harder to identify. Scientists, some illustrious, were called in to consult. Verdicts varied. The one most taken in by the hoax was probably the anthropologist Hermann Klaatsch, who initially guessed that "the creature belongs to the group of fossils that link the race of the Neanderthals with the current apes." Klaatsch later backed off this assessment, identifying it as a fossil ape and arguing that it served as evidence of apes in Europe in recent geologic time. Meanwhile Lüders, wanting to sustain enthusiasm, published this big newspaper article in June 1911. It was about that time that Rappe realized the joke had gone too far, especially since Friedrich Heiderich — an anatomist who identified the skull pretty accurately from the start — was getting clobbered by Lüders's public relations campaign. Rappe confessed to the hoax but tried to keep his identity a secret. It didn't stay secret for long, and the cave-excavation association and Klaatsch both wanted to sue. Klaatsch actually emerged from the affair relatively unscathed; his arguments that human races evolved from different ape species did more long-term damage to his reputation.

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Year: 1869

Con artist: Geroge Hull

Photographed in: Cardiff, New York (some rights reserved)

Now appears in: "The Great Cardiff Giant" chapter in Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White (http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/ cardiff.htm)

Before Piltdown Man, there was the Cardiff Giant, a "petrified giant" discovered during the digging of a well. The spectacular find was 10 feet, 4.5 inches tall and appeared to have weathered underground for a long time. Alternately identified as a Phoenician sculpture, an American Indian prophet and a biblical giant, it attracted fee-paying crowds, which soon enriched its so-called discoverer, Farmer Newell. But Cornell University cofounder Andrew White, who recounted the Cardiff events in his autobiography, smelled a rat. For starters, he couldn't see a good reason to dig a well where the giant turned up as "it was convenient neither to the house nor the barn; that there was already a good spring and a stream of water running conveniently to both." Farmer Newell apparently paid several thousand dollars scraped off the top of giant-viewing fees to some fellow out west even though he "had never been in condition to owe any human being such an amount of money." What stumped Dickson, though, was the weathered appearance of the limestone giant, with grooves seemingly carved by water currents over a long period. Then a friend surreptitiously brought Dickson a piece of the giant. The rock wasn't the tough limestone characteristic of the region, but gypsum soft enough to be scratched with a fingernail. And quietly observant farmers around Cardiff noticed a tall, skinny individual skulking around Farmer Newell's farm — the same man, it turned out, who had been observed transporting an enormous box to Cardiff shortly before the spectacular discovery was made.

Century: 16th

Scientist: Ulisse Aldrovandi

Now appears in: "The Oldest Herpetological Collection in the World: The Surviving Amphibian and Reptile Specimens of the Museum of Ulisse Aldrovandi" by Bauer, Ceregato and Delfino in Amphibia-Reptilia

Specimens collected by the 16th-century naturalist Aldrovandi numbered in the thousands. In the years after his death, his collection was scattered, most of the items eventually lost, or destroyed by age. But about 200 specimens still survive today in the Museo di Palazzo Poggi in Bologna. Among those hardy survivors are two toads, both of them sporting tails that were apparently added during Aldrovandi's day. Whoever enhanced these specimens was thorough enough to cover the artificial appendages with skin from the same species. Modern herpetologists know this because, despite their faked nature, the toads still preserve enough detail to be identified down to the species level. There's little indication that Aldrovandi himself attached the tails, but he admitted the toads had been faked. Despite their extraneous parts, he believed the toads were valuable parts of his collection. And if this toothy toad looks particularly menacing, that might be because its pearly whites are not from a frog but from a mammal.

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Century: 17th

Scientists: : Francis Willughby and John Ray

Now appears in: The Wonderful Mr. Willughby by Tim Birkhead

On his extended trip through Europe, the young English naturalist Francis Willughby purchased a flea on a gold chain, and it lived on its chain (and his blood) for several months, so he wasn't wrong to keep an open mind about what's possible. But another insect that wriggled its way into his collection was this chimera. Researching his book about Willughby, Birkhead looked through the scientist's surviving collection and found what appeared to be a spiny beetle. Birkhead had to consult other biologists to figure out what it was. The spiny head and thorax are actually the jaws of a fish, probably a moray eel. The spiny abdomen is probably from a plant, possibly hawthorn. It's not clear whether Willughby was taken in by this forgery, or bought it as an example of what contemporary con artists would do. Willughby collaborated closely for years with fellow naturalist John Ray, who oversaw publication of their coauthored books on birds and fish. A final book on insects came out after Ray himself had died, and though he was listed as the sole author, the insect studies had been a collaboration with Willughby. This spiny beetle made no appearance in it, which suggests that if they ever were fooled by this bug, they caught on to the trick.

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Year: 1613

Scientist/artist: Ulisse Aldrovandi

Originally published in: De Piscibus

Now appears in: Merchants and Marvels edited by Smith and Findlen

In his posthumously published book on fish, Aldrovandi didn't carry out a hoax, but instead showed how it could be done. This illustration showed a ray cleverly modified to look like a dragon. In fact, some collectors actually prized creations like this, even when they were known to be forgeries.

Year: 1640

Scientist/artist: Ulisse Aldrovandi

Originally published in: Serpentum, et Draconum Historiæ Libri Duo

Image provided by: Biodiversity Heritage Library (some rights reserved)

To anyone familiar with the appearance of a ray, this forgery might have been obvious even in Aldrovandi's day. The creature's "wings" are clearly pectoral fins that have been cut, and the mutilated fish came conveniently equipped with an exotic tail. Aldrovandi labeled this illustration "Draco alter ex Raia exsiccata concinnatus," which translates roughly as "Dragon dried and fashioned from a Ray."

Year: 1558

Scientist: Conrad Gesner

Originally published in: Historiae Animalium

Now appears in: "Foils and Fakes" by Suzanne Magnanini in Marvels & Tales Magazine

Even before Aldrovandi's book showed how rays could be manipulated into dragons or sea serpents, Gesner demonstrated the same phenomenon. The bustling port city of Venice emerged as a locus of ray-faking activity, and it was the place of manufacture of another fraud Gesner disdained: the seven-headed hydra.

Years: 1874-1918

Con artists: Håkan Dahlmark, Halvar Friesendahl, Carl Erik Hammarberg and Rudolf Granberg

Now appears in: The Historical Preservation Society in Medelpad

This cross between a female hare and a wood grouse cock was allegedly shot by Dahlmark in 1874. On his birthday in 1907, Dahlmark's housekeeper asked her nephew, Friesendahl, to paint a picture of it. Before his death, Dahlmark donated the painting to the historical society. Inspired to create a "real" skvader, the society's new director, Hammarberg, contacted Granberg, a talented taxidermist, and Granberg obliged him by making a stuffed specimen. In 1918, Hammarberg wrote an article in the local newspaper about the rare skvader, which, thanks to the sale of 3,000 postcards, would soon develop a worldwide reputation. Although some visitors to the historical society's museum are disappointed to find the skvader isn't genuine, few people have taken it very seriously.

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Narrative text and graphic design © by Michon Scott - Updated September 6, 2020