Finding something new to science can get you fame, respect or (if you play your cards right) a hefty pay-out... so is it really any wonder that not every "discovery" has turned out to be genuine? Take a skeptical look at:
- Beringer’s Lying Stones
- The Fiji Mermaid
- The Cardiff Giant
- The Piltdown Man
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| The "Piltdown Man" seemed to blend human and ape characteristics... probably because it was a mixture of ape and human bones! (Barni1) |
Beringer’s Lying Stones
Centuries ago, Dr. Johann Bartholomew Adam Beringer discovered a trove of fossils that would (at least in theory) shake the scientific world. Uncovered on Mount Eibelstadt by three lads in his employ, these stones held perfectly preserved creatures, plants... and Hebrew writing. There were so many finds that Beringer published a full book (Lithographia Wirceburgensis) to document them... which proved unfortunate since the "fossils" were fakes planted by J. Ignatz Roderick and Georg von Eckhart, his colleagues from the University of Wurzburg.
The digging team had been suborned by Beringer's jealous rivals and given freshly carved fossils to "find." The pranksters only realized that things had gone a bit too far when Beringer was about to release his work - they planted a rumor that the stones were forgeries in the hope of delaying the publication, but Beringer ironically wrote off the rumors as an attempt to sabotage him!
It wasn't until later that Beringer realized the deception (one story claims that it was when he found his own name written amongst the Hebrew) and attempted to recall the books. The scandal ruined the academic reputation of Beringer and led to a court case over the "lügensteine" or "lying stones" created by the pranksters. Roderick ended up banished from Wurzburg, while Eckhart was denied any further access to the archives of the duchy - which put a stop to his own scholarly ambitions.
The Fiji Mermaid
Mermaids are usually depicted as beautiful women with a piscine lower body. Not so the Fiji (or Feejee) mermaid, a strange creation brought to the USA by renowned showman P. T. Barnum and an associate posing as "Dr. J. Griffin from the British Lyceum of Natural History" in 1842.
Barnum went to the press and lamented that Griffin had a mermaid but was refusing to display it to the public - he even handed the papers a bunch of advertisements (featuring the traditional buxom version) he'd hoped to use. Soon enough, the media was full of stories about the mermaid and eventually "Dr J. Griffin" bowed to public pressure and was persuaded to put his creature on display for a limited time.
Of course, the Fiji mermaid did not resemble the sirens depicted in those adverts. Instead, the creature resembled a dried monkey torso and head attached to the lower half of a large fish... because it was. It turns out that these hybrid constructions were something of an art form amongst fishermen from that part of the world.
Multiple specimens of the Fiji mermaid exist, each with their own little idiosyncrasies. One example that ended up in Ohio featured the same monkey and fish combo, but added the clawed and scaly hands of a reptile to give it that authentic, sea-monster quality. There are also creations like the Jenny Haniver, or the even fishier stories of the sea monk and sea bishop!
On a personal note, I've actually seen a Fiji mermaid at the Shipwreck Centre & Maritime Museum on the Isle of Wight. They don't hold up well to a skeptical modern eye, but I can see how people could have been fooled a century ago!
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| Unfortunately for Dr Beringer, the fossils his diggers "found" were frequently fake...(funnytools) |
The Cardiff Giant
In 1869, Gideon Emmons and Henry Nichols uncovered a body as they dug a well in Cardiff, New York... but rather than the bones of a human, they had found a petrified body belonging to a 10ft tall man.
Though gigantism is a real condition, this particular "giant" was an extensively planned forgery. Con-artist George Hull had come up with the idea after talking to a priest who believed that the gigantic "Nephilim" mentioned in the bible had once existed on Earth. Keen to gull the clergyman and make a buck in the process, Hull bought a massive block of gypsum in Iowa and shipped it to Chicago for carving.
A lot of effort went into giving the statue an authentic appearance. The "skin" was pricked with needles to produce pores, while water, sand and acid were used to "weather" the finished product. Finally the giant was shipped to co-conspirator and relative William Newell’s farm and buried.
A year later, Hull and Newell hired workers to dig a well... that just so happened to be over the spot where the giant was buried. Naturally the "relic" was unearthed during the dig, with both believers and skeptics soon coming (and paying a fee) to view it.
The giant was eventually sold to David Hunnum for $23,000, who took it on tour - only for experts to definitively declare the find a fake. Paleontologist Othniel C. Marsh noted chisel marks (indicating that it was a statue rather than a fossil) and that even those marks should have eroded away over time. Despite this, famed showman P. T. Barnum attempted to buy the fake for $50,000 and (after being rebuffed) created a forgery of the forgery that drew bigger crowds than the original!
The Piltdown Man
Ever since the acceptance of evolution, scientists have been searching for fossils bridging the gap between humans and the other great apes. In 1912 amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson claimed to have found the remains of this "missing link" in the Pleistocene gravel beds outside Piltdown village in England.
Enlisting the help of Arthur Smith Woodward from the Natural History Museum, Dawson excavated more bones and even some simple tools from the site. The remains were estimated to date back half a million years, while a reconstruction of the skull suggested a blend of human and simian qualities.
In 1949 the story was called into question. Dr Kenneth Oakley (also of the National History Museum) performed fluorine tests on the remains and discovered they could only be 50,000 years old - far too late to be the missing link. Even worse, an Oxford University team working alongside Oakley determined that the some of the bones were human but others were orangutan or chimpanzee (and that some of the ape teeth had been filed down to resemble human ones.) The remains had also been dyed to match the Piltdown gravel - they were declared deliberate fakes in 1953.
Thanks for reading - for more weird wonders, try...