NEW YORK — When the smuggled stone slab first surfaced at a Tucson, Ariz., mineral show, it seemed like it might solve 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 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 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.
Suspicions about the fossil were confirmed when X-ray analysis revealed that the fossil was a mosaic made from 88 fragments of rock and fossil glued to a supporting slab of shale. Grout had been used to fill any gaps.
As best anyone can tell, the fossils were 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. Researchers suspect that a local villager glued the fragments together to create a more lucrative specimen for the thriving black market in fossils.
"They see that a nice specimen fetches more money," said Kevin Padian, an expert on avian evolution at the University of California Museum of Paleontology. "If they enhance it a bit, it just looks better."
Copyright. 2002 The Seattle Times Company