Posts Tagged ‘fraud’

“This little creature is going to show us our connection with the rest of all the mammals; with cows and sheep, and elephants and anteaters,” said Sir David Attenborough who narrated the BBC documentary in May 2009. “The more you look at Ida, the more you can see, as it were, the primate in embryo.”

“It tells a part of our evolution that’s been hidden so far. It’s been hidden because the only [other] specimens are so incomplete and so broken there’s nothing almost to study”, said Dr Jørn Hurum, the paleontologist from Oslo University’s Natural History Museum who assembled the scientific team. The fossil findings were released to the world at a press conference in New York, simultaneously with online publication of the paper in Public Library of Science (PLoS ONE) on May 19, 2009.

At the opening press conference, the fossil was described as the “missing link” in human evolution. “This fossil rewrites our understanding of the evolution of primates… It will probably be pictured in all the textbooks for the next 100 years”, claimed the Ida investigative team. Ida was interpreted as our “human ancestor”—the first and only one known.

The fossil had even been formally named Darwinius masillae in honour of Darwin’s 200th birthday year during 2009.  

The widely publicized Darwinius paper was released along with a book entitled The Link: Uncovering Our Earliest Ancestor, a DVD entitled The Link, This Changes Everything,  a History Channel documentary, and an exhibit in the American Museum of Natural History. At a news conference attended by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the authors unveiled the nearly complete Darwinius masillae fossil found in Germany. The New York Daily News noted,

“The unveiling of the fossil came as part of an orchestrated publicity campaign unusual for scientific discoveries.”

As the Darwinian celebrations were sinking into the sand by the end of 2009, however, so was the “missing link” status of Ida as scientists continued to analysis the fossil. By October 2009, the BBC retracted their position running ran an article entitled “Primate Fossil ‘Not an Ancestor’”, stating,

“The exceptionally well-preserved fossil primate known as “Ida” is not a missing link as some have claimed.”

The sand-sinking fossil fiasco was finalized following the March 2010 article in the Journal of Human Evolution by paleontologists Blythe Williams, Richard Kay, Christopher Kirk, and Callum Ross confirming initial suspicions that the original description of Darwinius which appeared in the journal PLoS One was fatality flawed.

The updated analysis by Williams and team members painted a damning picture of the original Darwinius study. The team reports that the features of bones in the skull teeth, and limbs clearly demonstrate that Ida is not even a primate—certainly not a human ancestor.

In March 2010 news editor for the NewScientist, Rowan Hooper, published the article entitled Confirmed: Fossil Ida is Not a Human Ancestor stating – “About a year ago we were stunned in the New Scientist offices to learn of a beautiful, 47-million-year-old primate fossil which was being hyped as the ancestor to all humans. Nicknamed ‘Ida’, The Guardian newspaper hailed it as “the eighth wonder of the world… Now an independent team has examined the fossil in detail. In a paper in the Journal of Human Evolution they strongly argue that Darwinius is not one of our ancestors.”

The Ida fossil announcement in PLoS ONE followed the same pattern as the Archaeoraptor fossil disaster announcement in National Geographic magazine in 1999. This pattern follows a strict evolutionary paradigm approach where ideology drives the interpretation. Ida serves yet another example how the evolution paradigm distorts and stifles scientific investigation and undermines the credibility of the modern scientific establishment.

Ida and Archaeoraptor join a long line of fossil fiascos, including Archaeopteryx, Java Man, and the Piltdown man. Fossil fraud and deception by the evolution industry continues to pervade the history of evolutionary, perhaps because the fossil record evidence continues to contradict the Darwinian theory of evolution.

“No wonder paleontologists shied away from evolution for so long”, pines Niles Eldredge, evolutionary paleontologist, “It seems never to [have] happen[ed].”

Douglas Futuyma, president of the Society for the Study of Evolution and the American Society of Naturalists, editor of Evolution, abandoned Darwinism stating,

“The supposition that evolution proceeds very slowly and gradually, and so should leave thousands of fossil intermediates of any species in its wake, has not been part of evolutionary theory for more than thirty years.”

Ida fossil highlights again the reasons why evolution remains a theory in crisis—the fossil record evidence continues to contradict the Darwinian theory of evolution.  

Every fossil discovery has a unique story, and the story of the Archaeoraptor is no exception. In November 1999, a feature article in National Geographic titled “Feathers for T. Rex?” played out to be one of the worst debacles in the now storied history of the new fossil discoveries. The article claimed to provide “a true missing link in the complex chain that connects dinosaurs to birds.”

Discovered at Xiasanjiazi in China’s northeastern Liaoning Province, the fossil named Archaeoraptor liaoningensis appeared to have the body of a bird with the teeth and tail of a small, terrestrial dinosaur. The “discovery” seemed to fit the missing link criteria by filling in the gap of the popular reptile/dinosaur-to-bird scheme. The Archaeoraptor was displayed to have a long, bony tail like that of dinosaurs along with the specialized shoulders and chest of birds.

The Associated Press was the first to notice the story, and soon the major news networks were reporting the discovery of the new missing link that looked like a “fierce turkey-sized animal with sharp claws and teeth.”

The celebration was on. Philip Currie of the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Alberta, Canada, weighed in, proclaiming the Archaeoraptor to be the first dinosaur capable of flying. The story had barely broken before questions about the fossil started taking flight, leaving the National Geographic suddenly embroiled in one of the hottest scientific controversies in decades.

The questioning was started by Storrs Olson, the eminent curator of birds at the prestigious Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History. In a letter to the National Geographic Society, Olson stated that the story reached “an all-time low for engaging in sensationalistic, unsubstantiated, tabloid journalism.”

Olson was on target, and the National Geographic found itself in the embarrassing position of having to retract the entire article because, as it turned out, the Archaeoraptor fossil was a fake—a neatly contrived composite of a bird and a dinosaur tail.

In reflecting on the incident, Olson laid blame for the fossil fiasco clearly on “zealous scientists” that have abandoned the scientific method to become “proselytizers of the faith” promoting “scientific hoaxes,” and “the paleontological equivalent of cold fusion.”

Several months later in the March 2000 issue of National Geographic, the magazine published a letter to the editor from Xu Xing, one of the scientists who had first examined and discussed the fossil discovery. The letter stated, “After observing a new, feathered dromaeosaur specimen … [t]hough I do not want to believe it, Archaeoraptor appears to be composed of a dromaeosaur tail and a bird body.”

Seven months later in October 2000, National Geographic published a five-page article by veteran investigative reporter Lewis Simons describing how the hoax evolved. In the article “Archaeoraptor Fossil Trail,” Simons pined on the painful discovery: “An investigative reporter does some digging to unearth the truth behind a case of fossil fraud.”

Simons explained how farmers in China had developed a profitable hobby of selling the fossils they “discovered.” They doctored the fossils to follow basic market economics to increase the value of their “discoveries.” In the excitement, evolutionists were conveniently blinded by their belief in the theory. 

The Archaeoraptor illustrates the problem when the theory becomes more important than the evidence. Tragically, Charles Darwin touted this approach in a letter to John Scott in 1863: “I would suggest to you the advantage … let the theory guide your observations.”

Evolutionists continue in the Darwin tradition—let the theory mask the interpretation of the evidence.

Even in an era with unsurpassed technological advances, fraud in science continues to invade deep into the ranks of esteemed institutions. Storrs Olson, of the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History, in 2000 lamented that there “probably has never been a fossil with a sadder history than this one.”

Proof of the hoax was not long in coming. Later in March 2001, Nature published the results of the fossil investigation. Using high-resolution X-ray computed tomography (CT), the investigators concurred that the fossil was a forgery built in three layers. Timothy Rowe concluded that Archaeoraptor represents two or more species and that it was assembled from at least two, and possibly five, separate specimens. If there is any light at the end of the tunnel, Rowe gave a positive spin in the Nature article on the Archaeoraptor forgery, saying that technology may prevent future forensic fraud.

The Archaeoraptor disaster follows a fraud legacy starting with Haeckel’s embryos that founded Darwin’s “most important” evidence for evolution. 

According to the February 27^th edition of Nature, more doubts now cloud the claim that dinosaur protein has been sequenced. Now a long-time critic has called for an independent review of the 2007 studies of ancient protein from a fossilized Tyrannosaurus rex after fresh analysis revealed traces of ostrich haemoglobin in the original samples.

In the contentious papers, researchers identified seven fragments from a protein called collagen, found in connective tissue, and said their sequences most closely matched the chicken version of the protein. The samples came from the fossilized femur of a T. Rex. As well as further strengthening the evidence for the link between dinosaurs and birds, the findings would make the protein the oldest ever to be sequenced. The work, published in Science, garnered headlines worldwide and met with considerable scepticism at the time, for good reason—fraud.

The hunt for Darwin’s “inconceivably great” missing links continues.