Piltdown Man, Beringer’s lying stones, dinosaurs… are they all hoaxes?
by Alice Roberts from on (#3J9J)
Palaeontologists of the past have fallen for some barely believable fakes. So what to think about ultra-sceptics who still question the existence of dinosaurs?
The history of palaeontology is littered with examples of famous frauds and fakes, often with eminent researchers in the field being thoroughly hoodwinked by some fairly shoddy fabrications.
One of the most famous is Piltdown Man. Discovered in a gravel pit in Sussex in 1912, a few ancient-looking fragments of a skull and jawbone quickly became hailed as evidence of a very early type of human, perhaps half a million years old. The specimens were named Eoanthropus dawsoni ("Dawson's dawn man"), after their discoverer, amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson.
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