Horizon (1964–…): Season 38, Episode 12 - The Dinosaur That Fooled the World - full transcript
When this small and broken
fossil first appeared
it was hailed as one of the most
important finds of the decade.
It's very, very hard to describe
that feeling of discovery.
It's, it's like walking
to the top of Mount Everest.
Scientists said
it was the missing link
that supported one of the most controversial
theories in modern palaeontology.
This is enormous.
I mean for anybody who has devoted
their, their life to this science
it's hard to imagine anything
that could be more important.
Yet when they examined it
they found, buried within it,
something they had never expected.
My first reaction was not
necessarily disbelief, but...
Wait a minute.
It was disbelief,
it was total disbelief.
This is the story
of a mysterious fossil
that fooled some of the best
scientific brains in the world.
In spring 1999 a small wooden
box arrived in America.
It came in as hand baggage
labelled fragile after a six thousand
mile journey from China.
Inside was a new and unknown fossil.
It was destined for one of the biggest
and most important fossil fairs in the world.
Here thousands of fossils go on display.
Most are bought and sold
by local dealers
and small, private collectors,
but the new Chinese specimen
was different.
It was headed for a quiet
and exclusive part of the fair,
a small, private room
on an upper floor
away from the public gaze.
Only a few privileged dealers
with big money to spend
would be invited to see it.
One of them was
Florence McGovern.
We worked with a network of people
and within that network
there are fossils that are shared,
behind closed doors often,
because they're very
special fossils.
As soon as I came
in the door he said,
'Pete, you've got
to see something,
I've got something
really special to show you,'
and he opened up the drawer
and he pulled out the most unbelievable
fossil that I've ever seen.
I carried it out to the, the light of,
of the sunlight so that I could see it cross lit
and there were a number of beautiful teeth
in this skull and that was very exciting
and then we studied also the tail
that was a dinosaur, very dinosaur-like tail.
I got this incredible high feeling like
climbing to the top of Mount Everest.
It is the, the feeling of discovery, that wonderful
time when everything clicks into position.
Both McGovern and Larson thought
they could be looking
at one of the most important
fossils ever found,
a specimen that would prove,
beyond doubt,
one of the most controversial
theories in all of evolution:
that dinosaurs had
evolved into birds.
The idea that something
as graceful and slight as a bird
could have come
from a dinosaur
is one of the most
extraordinary ideas in evolution.
Dinosaurs didn't have feathers,
they didn't have wings
and they couldn't fly.
The theory goes back
to the mid-1800s
when Thomas Huxley,
one of Darwin's most fervent disciples,
examined a strange looking
fossil called Archaeopteryx.
It looked to him
like a dinosaur,
but it had one feature
never seen on a dinosaur before:
feathers.
Clearly looking at the skeleton
we have a dinosaur.
it had a long tail,
it had teeth in the jaws,
it had three clawed fingers,
it had three toes.
The only thing that identified it
as a bird were the feathers.
But this was good enough
for Huxley.
Basing his ideas heavily
on the existence of the feathers,
he argued that Archaeopteryx
was a half bird, half dinosaur.
He then advanced an extraordinary theory:
birds must have evolved from dinosaurs.
To many in the field it seemed
to show one of the great wonders of evolution.
As far as I'm concerned
Archaeopteryx is one of the most
important scientific discoveries ever made.
When it was discovered it was quite
clear right from the beginning
that you had this combination of characters and it
showed a bridge between birds and dinosaurs.
Yet the theory is very controversial
and many scientists think
Huxley simply got it wrong.
One of them is leading bird
palaeontologist Professor Larry Martin.
The evidence for bird dinosaurs and
this just isn't my conclusion alone.
There are a number of people,
in fact almost all the people
who work on fossil birds agree with me,
is that when we look at these characters closely
we find the evidence that birds are
related to dinosaurs is not very solid.
It's sort of like someone should
say that you or I are related
because my big toe looks
a little bit like your nose.
The objectors returned again
and again to the same point:
how could such a huge,
lumbering creature as a dinosaur
have ever sprouted wings
and taken to the air?
Huxley's supporters needed
to answer two critical questions.
First, how could a dinosaur
have started to fly,
but above all they needed to find
what palaeontologists call a transitional form,
a fossil that is
half bird, half dinosaur
and which shows the process of change
from one into the other actually taking place.
It's become one of the most
sought after fossils in palaeontology.
At the fossil fair Pete Larson
couldn't believe his luck.
It looked as though
he was holding the very fossil
palaeontologists had been hoping
to find for so long.
This fossil, this clearly cross
between a bird and a dinosaur,
was, was what everybody
had been looking for
and here it was, right there, right in front of my eyes
and I was one of the first people to see it.
I looked it over very carefully,
literally under a magnifying glass,
and I was looking
for any telltale features,
particularly on the tail.
I wanted to look at that tail very carefully
because it was clearly, clearly a dinosaur tail.
In front of him, scarcely visible
among the fractures in the rock,
was an animal
nobody had ever seen before.
It had the unmistakeable head
and body of a primitive bird,
it had bird-like legs
and what looked like feathers,
but it had a very clear
dinosaur-like tail.
Here was the transitional animal,
half bird, half dinosaur, palaeontologists
had been searching for for 150 years.
It sold for $80,000.
Within weeks news of the new fossil
reached Washington
and the offices
of the National Geographic Society.
It's one of the most venerable
and influential learned societies in America.
Its magazine is the most widely read
educational journal in the world.
A new evolutionary missing link
was just the sort of story it specialises in.
Dinosaurs themselves are inherently
interesting to almost everyone
from whether you're four years old,
or 104 years old and anything that,
that promises to have such an interest
as gee whiz, you mean crows in my backyard
may be a direct descendant of dinosaurs.
Well of course that's something that people
are going to be interested in.
The magazine was already planning
an article on the evolution of birds.
Now it had a major scoop.
The new fossil provided
fresh and powerful evidence
which would turn the story
into a ground breaking report.
As more and more information
came in about this specimen
and, and people began to recognise
that this might indeed be the missing link
and a very important element
in the history of palaeontology,
in the history of the world,
there was a great deal of excitement.
That's pretty dark...
This is enormous.
I mean for anybody who has devoted
their, their life to this science
it's hard to imagine anything
that could be more important.
But excitement was not enough.
If the fossil really did answer
one of the biggest riddles in evolution
the magazine had to be
100% sure of its facts.
The magazine agreed to fund
the scientific analysis of the fossil
in return for exclusive press coverage.
It turned to some of the best people
in the business.
The fossil was about to undergo the most thorough
investigation modern science could throw at it.
Dr Philip Currie is one
of the world's top palaeontologists.
He's spent a lifetime scouring remote corners
of the world in search of dinosaur remains.
For him the new fossil promised the end
of a lifelong search for Huxley's missing link
and the opportunity
to learn more about
one of the most intriguing groups
of animals ever to roam the earth.
People like dinosaurs.
I mean you get fascinated
by them when you're very young,
you think they're wonderful animals.
Kids I think love dinosaurs because
they represent so many superlatives.
They're the biggest animals,
the heaviest animals,
the most bizarre animals
and they ruled the world for so long.
Currie now became the most
influential member of the investigative team.
Every fossil find is normally accompanied
by a set of explanatory notes
listing where and how
it was collected,
information which will help
date and authenticate it,
but the new fossil had none of this.
The scientific process includes
not just the collection of specimens,
but also the collection of data and that data
collection is very, very important to scientists.
Sometimes the data is more important
than the specimen itself,
so when you acquire a specimen
where you don't have information
on who collected it,
where it was collected exactly,
how it was collected,
there's no photographs,
there's no field sketches,
then you have to be
a little bit more suspicious.
Without the usual background notes
this was going to be an unusually
difficult specimen to interpret.
All they had to go on
was the fossil itself.
To make it easier to see
specialists were employed to cut away
the background rock and expose the skeleton.
Currie needed to know the shape and size
of the bones and how they all fitted together.
Only then would it be possible to judge
what sort of animal this really was.
We felt that we had to know
what was going on
and so we examined all the different pieces
of the specimen to see how they went together
and whether in fact we had contact between
the front and the back of each bone.
The work was made more difficult
because the fossil had been badly fractured
when it was taken out of the earth.
The examination took several months,
but as they slowly peeled away
the surrounding rock
the ghost of the pieces
of the skeleton began to emerge.
There was a bird-like head,
the body and arms were also
unmistakeably those of a bird,
but the legs looked as though
they belonged to a dinosaur-like creature
and the bones of the tail were fused
together to form the short, rigid tail
typical of a ground living dinosaur.
Their best guess suggested it was
a bird-like creature from the pelvis up
and a dinosaur from the pelvis down.
They called it Archaeoraptor,
or ancient hunter.
In Washington the deadline
for the article was approaching,
yet with the scientists still uncertain exactly
how the different parts of the skeleton fitted together
National Geographic agreed
to fund further research.
I can tell you as, as a journalist
who's done other stories for the magazine
that the, the fact checking
at National Geographic
is absolutely the most rigorous
I've ever been put through.
They go to the most extraordinary lengths
to check out the authenticity
of virtually every word
that appears in the magazine.
With only weeks before publication,
the Archaeoraptor was booked in
for one of the most sophisticated examinations
currently available to palaeontology.
In August 1999 it arrived at the CAT
scan laboratory of the University of Texas.
It's arguably the best equipped
palaeontology laboratory in the world.
Here equipment used for probing the human body
has been adapted for use on fossils.
It's run by Professor Tim Rowe,
who has built a pioneering reputation for his work.
The technology allows him to build
a digital model of a fossil
so that each and every bone
can be clearly seen.
It's as if you had a loaf of bread
and you stacked the loaf of bread up
and one by one by one
you were slicing it up,
so we can see the specimen from inside out
as if we'd physically cut it open,
but the process is entirely non-destructive.
The first thing Rowe produced
was an overall image of the fossil,
a hazy ghost-like picture.
He then digitally enhanced it
so that the skeleton was clearly visible.
What we have here is
a very interesting specimen.
Here's the skull.
This is the tip of the snout here
and the brain case is here
and the skull is twisted back
in a rigor mortis posture.
This means is that the top is here,
the bottom is here
and here is the neck.
It's twisted back in this characteristic
death posture that many fossils exhibit
and it's lying on its back
with one arm over itself,
the other arm off to the side.
Here's the shoulder,
here's the elbow,
here's the wrist.
The wrist is cocked, looks
like this animal had wings
and yet we see a little, tiny claw
on the end of this finger.
Very strange thing to see in a bird.
Here's the thigh bone,
the knee,
there's the shin,
here's the ankle,
here's the foot and the various toes
have slightly come apart down here
and then finally juxtaposed against
that is this tail unlike any other bird tail,
tail that had only been seen
in a non-flying dinosaur.
That was startling, it was very unusual
to see this combination of characters
and we wondered well,
what's going on here.
Rowe was keen to find out
more about this curious creature,
but the investigation,
as far as National Geographic was concerned,
suggested the Archaeoraptor was
everything that was claimed for it.
In Autumn 1999 National Geographic
published its article in a blaze of publicity.
The fossil of Archaeoraptor found
its way from China to Utah
and fortunately it did end up in the care
of people whose knowledge of dinosaurs
helped them quickly realise
what a find it is.
It is a true missing link
between dinosaurs and birds that could fly.
Here was the missing link. There's,
there's no better term for it.
This was going to, to rewrite palaeontology,
was going to rewrite history,
it was going to, it was going to say
to the few sceptics out there
that all your doubt about birds evolving from
land-bound dinosaurs are now worth nothing.
A 150 year old riddle
seemed to have been solved.
Yet on the other side of the world
something even more extraordinary
was about to unfold.
Xu Xing is a Chinese palaeontologist
who specialises in dinosaurs.
He'd been at the National Geographic
press conference in America
and been fascinated by what he saw.
When I came back from the US
I was very excited
because I'd seen an important fossil
that had come from China.
It was a very significant specimen
and I wanted to know
a lot more about it.
Xu Xing knew that
if he could find another specimen
he might be able to learn more
about this mysterious creature.
It had come from the Liaoning
region in Northern China,
one of the richest
fossil areas in the world.
The rock here is formed
by layers of volcanic ash
which over 130 million years ago buried
a wetland that had teemed with wildlife.
It's created perfect conditions
for preserving even the most delicate creatures.
We've discovered a huge number
of fossils: dinosaurs, birds and others.
They are very common
in Liaoning province.
They are all fantastically
well preserved.
Some have got skin on them still.
In some cases even the intestines
and internal organs have been preserved.
These are incredibly precious
and rare specimens,
saved by the unique nature
of the rock here.
There are a large number of them.
Xu Xing now began to search the area.
It's peppered with dig sites.
The search dragged on for two months.
It was like looking
for a needle in a haystack,
but nobody had seen anything
like the Archaeoraptor.
One of the best sources
of information is local farmers
who are paid by China's
geological institutions
to spend up to six months
of the year digging and sifting rock.
I contacted farmers
and asked if they'd seen anything
with the body of a bird
and a tail of a dinosaur.
A lot of them have got
private stores of fossils
and I thought maybe we'll be lucky
and somebody will have something similar.
But again nobody had seen anything.
Xu Xing kept moving.
He even scoured some
of the disused dig sites.
The search was going nowhere,
but then he got a message.
I heard from a farmer that he'd found
something similar to Archaeoraptor,
so I went to his house.
It was very exciting.
Life in the region's villages is harsh
and many farmers don't just dig for fossils,
they've become amateur dealers.
They've been responsible for bringing
to light a number of important finds.
Xu Xing was directed
to a small house.
Here, in a dark room,
on a pile of wooden boxes,
the farmer had laid out
a small and cracked specimen.
There was no head and upper body
and yet it seemed to look
similar to the Archaeoraptor.
As far as he could see with the naked eye
it had the same dinosaur-like tail.
He could just about make out
the trace of a feather.
It looked very promising,
but it would need
more detailed examination.
Back in Beijing Xu Xing
headed for his laboratory.
Here he compared his new find with photographs
of the Archaeoraptor specimen in America.
The more he looked,
the more the two specimens looked alike.
The new fossil was very incomplete,
but what there was suggested
he really had found another Archaeoraptor.
This is a picture of the Archaeoraptor.
When I compared it with the tail
of the new fossil they were a very similar length.
The new fossil had a slightly longer tail
than the Archaeoraptor's,
but we knew something
was missing from it.
When you allow for this
the tails looked very similar.
In fact the tails were
virtually identical
except for the missing piece
from the National Geographic specimen.
The more he looked the more uncanny
the match appeared to be.
There is the crack along
the tail of the new fossil.
You can see that there is a very similar crack
along the Archaeoraptor's tail.
The crack ran beside both tails
in exactly the same place
and for exactly the same distance.
It was even the same width.
There was something else, too.
Both the slabs have also got an identical
yellow dotted line running beside the tail.
It was the same yellow stain
on both fossils
and it was in the same place.
Xu Xing realised he'd almost certainly stumbled
on something much more than mere coincidence.
The rock in this region of China is made up
of hundreds of layers of tightly compressed sediment.
As it's dug up it splits apart.
When this happens fossils trapped
in the sediment can split down the middle,
some bones sticking
to one side of the fracture,
some to the other.
Some even split in half attaching
to both sides of the fracture.
The two pieces are known as the slab
and the counterslab of the fossil.
There are a series of small and even
holes along the two sides of the tail.
Some are concave, some are convex.
They are the results of the rock splitting in two
and if you put them together you
will find they are a perfect match.
It seemed an extraordinary piece of luck.
The two tails didn't just look the same, they were the same.
It was one tail split down the middle.
The evidence was overwhelming.
I was now 100% sure that the two tails
had come from the same fossil.
By an almost unbelievable coincidence
Xu Xing had found not
another Archaeoraptor,
but the counterslab
of the National Geographic specimen.
Yet as he moved up
from the tail to the pelvic region
there was something
very mysterious.
The pelvises of the two fossils
should have been identical,
but they were completely different.
The Archaeoraptor's was
small and damaged.
The new fossil's was
large and intact
and showed two hind legs which were
very different from the Archaeoraptor's.
It made no sense.
He compared them again.
The photos of the Archaeoraptor showed
a clear fracture between the tail and the pelvis
which didn't exist on the new fossil.
As Xu Xing studied the two specimens
an awful realisation dawned on him.
There could only be one explanation.
Somebody had glued a different head and upper body
onto the tail of the National Geographic specimen.
It was a fake.
Xu Xing emailed National Geographic
in Washington.
I'm very sorry to tell you
that I am now 100% certain
that the fossil you have is a composite
made from more than one specimen.
The news of the fake came
as a thunderbolt to National Geographic.
Could it be that the most popular educational
magazine in the world had got its facts wrong?
The magazine had never faced
such humiliation in its 113 year history.
My first reaction was not
necessarily disbelief, but...
Wait a minute.
It was disbelief,
it was total disbelief.
Allen was beside himself. He was furious,
he was livid, he was hurt,
he was angry in ways that, that are
almost unimaginable because it wasn't
as though they just buried this somewhere
in the back of the publication.
It was a big, important story and now
he's been told you've been had.
Allen's first instinct was to question
whether Xu Xing could possibly be right.
How could the magazine,
after so much costly checking by some
of the best brains in the business,
have made such a mistake?
He asked the magazine's advisers
to urgently recheck their research.
At the University of Texas Tim Rowe
had continued to examine his data.
The fossil had always puzzled him
and the CAT scan had thrown up some serious
questions about how the fossil fitted together.
I'm going to show you two slices.
The first is this slice here
through the skull
and these other elements here
and the second slice would be back
through the ankle and through the tail,
through this critical region here,
through one of the legs
and when we go to these slices
here's what we see.
Here's the skull
and you can see the skull
is part of this upper layer of shale
and with this you can see
the fracture pattern here.
Here's a very tight fractures
that fit together,
here a pair of curved fractures,
one fitting against the next.
A straight fracture,
the pieces on either side are
the same thickness, they're the same density,
but when we get out here
to the very edge of the block
this piece is a little bit thicker
than the piece it's glued against.
It's also a little denser
than the piece it's glued against.
Now as we move down to the tail,
to the critical area,
we can see that it's
completely surrounded by grout
and that there are
no natural ties
between the tail piece and this piece
to the right or this piece to the left.
I guess it's just swimming
in this ocean of grout here
and as we map
through the entire specimen
we found that there were
no verifiable fits between the tail
and any of the other parts
anywhere else in the specimen.
The scan clearly showed
what the naked eye couldn't see.
There was no natural skeletal link
between the all important tail
and the rest of the fossil.
It had simply been
glued on with grout.
Rowe says that he'd long
suspected the fossil was a fake,
but for reasons that
are not clear to this day,
the message had never got
through to National Geographic.
Rowe now put all his data together.
It wasn't just the tail
that had been tacked on to the fossil.
We saw that the thigh bone
had been glued in.
Then the two shin bones,
or the tibias, had been glued in
and as we looked at these more carefully
we could see that one was a slab
and the other was the counterslab
of the same specimen.
It was a single, it was a single
leg bone that had been split
and both halves had been glued in to make it
look as though right and lefts were naturally present
and the same was also true
of the feet.
The feet are mirror images
of one another.
They'd been split and glued in.
It's a single foot,
but it had been glued in to make it
look as if it were right and left feet
and there was a boundary
almost like the San Andreas Fault
line running through this specimen
where pieces that fit
very tightly together
were juxtaposed against pieces
that didn't fit very well together.
Scientists now constructed a model
of how the fake had been put together.
The head and upper body were
from an unknown bird-like creature.
The tail came from a small,
unidentified dinosaur
and the shin bones were almost
certainly from yet another animal,
again unidentified,
and the feet were probably
from a fourth.
The scans had confirmed
Xu Xing's finding.
The Archaeoraptor was indeed a fake.
Across America National Geographic faced
a very public barrage of embarrassing headlines.
The magazine blamed its advisers
for letting it down.
It's a question of betrayed
trust in many ways.
When you have scientists who are considered
the best in the world in their field,
you work with them in a collegial
fashion you expect straight answers.
We had had no indication
of any problem from the scanning.
We'd had no indication of any problem
from anyone who had looked at the preparation
and we had no indication of any problem
from the scientists that we were relying on as well.
Currie remembers things
slightly differently.
Clearly there was a bit
of a problem with communication
where we were saying things
that weren't always picked up
and yet we thought
they were being picked up.
But one thing Currie did make clear was his
regret at ever getting involved in the project.
Phil Currie wrote me a personal; letter of apology
and said this was the worst mistake of his career.
Everybody involved was, was trying
to make up for mistakes, to shift blame and,
and to, to make themselves look as good as
possible under a very uncomfortable
and disconcerting set of circumstances. In the end,
as far as I'm concerned, nobody looked good.
The scientists faced
a double embarrassment.
The fake had thrown into question the whole idea
of a relationship between birds and dinosaurs.
An important evolutionary theory
had been rocked to its core.
The whole debate about the origin
of birds from dinosaurs
has reached monumental
levels in recent years
and the amount of publicity
for it has been quite amazing
and I think that when this mistake,
so called mistake,
was realised of course people
who didn't want birds to come from dinosaurs
were able to exploit that
and say they'd finally got victory.
The effect of Archaeoraptor
has largely been just simply to demonstrate
that people that believe
strongly in an idea
can be easily fooled
and as a result of that
it becomes far more credible
that they have made
a lot of mistakes.
That has a huge effect on the credibility
of people who say that birds are dinosaurs.
One of the grandest theories
in evolution
was firmly back
in the file marked 'unsolved'.
Questions like how dinosaurs
had evolved into creatures that could fly
seemed as unanswerable as ever,
but the story was about
to take another new turn.
In the aftermath it became clear
that the Liaoning region of China
is not just famous
for its fabulous fossils.
It's also home to a highly
developed faking industry.
Dr Zhonge Zhou, a scientist at Beijing's
Institute of Palaeontology, has been monitoring it.
Farmers or dealers can make
a much bigger profit
if they've got the fossil
of a complete animal.
They take a damaged specimen
and add the parts from other animals
to make a new one
which looks complete.
In one place I saw them putting all the bits
from a dinosaur's leg into a box,
just like a box
of machine spare parts
so that they could add them
to different fossils.
A whole fossil, even one put
together from different creatures,
sells for far more
than a genuine but damaged specimen.
A damaged fossil might sell
for a few hundred yuan,
but when broken bits are used to make
a complete one it can sell for several thousand.
It was from these murky origins
that the Archaeoraptor had emerged.
Somewhere an expert had put together
a fake that had fooled the world.
Rowe believes it could only have been made
by a mastermind who knew exactly what he was doing.
I don't believe this was built by a, a humble
Chinese farmer, I believe that this passed
through hands of someone in a very
privileged scientific position.
The specimen was glued together in such a way that
there are no duplications of parts and it's done
in a very convincing way, so this is a person that
has anatomical knowledge and that knew
how to build a skeleton that looked like
a real skeleton,
so it's someone that has an academic background
and that knew how to construct a clever transitional form.
but in his urge to make a quick profit
the faker, for all his skill,
had completely missed the real value
of what he had.
In Beijing Xu Xing had begun to examine the counterslab
of the National Geographic specimen's tail.
He was curious to know what he'd got.
It was incomplete and damaged,
but he could clearly see the short,
rigid tail of a dinosaur,
but there was something
very surprising.
The remains of the pelvis suggested
it was the smallest dinosaur ever found.
Even more unusually, it showed signs
of having the feathers of a bird
and the light and spindly legs suggested
a creature adapted to climbing and perching
rather than running along the ground.
To Xu Xing this looked like the first dinosaur
ever found that could live in trees.
This is the original artist's impression
based on the initial research.
You can see this was a dinosaur
with a very small bird-like body,
but there's also something else
very important about the skeleton.
The hind legs suggests that this
may have been a dinosaur that lived in trees.
This was a new and completely
unknown creature
and contained within it
evolutionary data never found before.
Here was an animal that had evolved
into something more like a bird
than any dinosaur
previously known about.
The interesting thing is that this fossil
is not only the closest to a bird-dinosaur ever found,
it also provides the first fossil evidence
that some dinosaurs may have lived in trees.
It even seemed to offer a clue
to one of the most difficult questions
thrown up by the bird-dinosaur theory:
how had dinosaurs turned
into creatures that could fly?
If they had lived in trees
then it wasn't such a big evolutionary hop
to developing a mechanism for flight.
Xu Xing's specimen had a number
of very significant indicators
which marked it as a missing link
between dinosaurs and birds.
It may turn out to be one of the most
significant finds of recent years.
In America, something equally
astonishing was coming to light.
The other half of the fake fossil was throwing up
more fascinating and unexpected results.
As Tim Rowe studied
the head and body
he could see that it was clearly
the skeleton of a bird.
These bones all go together.
This is a natural,
verifiable new skeleton.
It's a unique combination
of characters with a big breast bone,
a big wishbone,
a flight capable wing
and yet it retains claws
and moving up to the skull up here
we find that it still has teeth.
This was an extraordinary
combination of features.
Birds don't have
teeth or hands,
yet this creature
had the hands of a dinosaur
and the wings of a bird.
It also had the teeth of a dinosaur
but the beak of a bird.
It was another brand new animal
scientists had never heard of or seen before.
This was the most powerful flyer
ever found in early Cretaceous rocks
and yet this is an animal
that had teeth.
Interesting combination of characters
that we'd never seen before in a bird,
so it was startling,
it was, it was interesting to see
these strange combinations of characters
and it's, it's possible that this could
have been a transitional form.
In other words the head and upper body of the forged
fossil was another remarkable specimen.
Extraordinarily here was another creature
in transition between dinosaurs and birds,
a second link in the chain
between the two species.
We haven't found anything
like this yet.
It shows us the antiquity
of the modern flight device.
I, I predict that this specimen will play an important role
in understanding the history of modern birds.
The fake fossil was a commercial fraud
but a scientific goldmine.
The upper portion was
a bird with dinosaur features
and the tail was a dinosaur
with bird-like characteristics.
It was not one,
but two creatures
showing all the evolutionary characteristics
of a missing link.
Both of these specimens
are scientifically significant
and they were nearly lost
to science
and two scientifically significant
specimens were combined
into one deceptive whole in the favour
of the greater commercial value of that whole.
It may be that we really can now say
that dinosaurs evolved into birds
and that one of the most important theories
in evolution has finally been proved.
If that's true it radically alters
our perception of the fate of the dinosaur family.
What it means is that dinosaurs
in the end were not failures.
Dinosaurs were animals that did give rise
to another group of animals: birds.
They're still incredibly
successful animals today
and in fact under modern biological
or palaeontological classification
we would consider birds
as part of the dinosauria.
The faked fossil sold
in 1999 for $80,000.
It seemed at the time
an enormous sum of money.
Today it's back in China
and valued at over $1m.
A fossil that once fooled the world
is now helping science unravel
one of the biggest mysteries in evolution.
Converted into subtitles by m06166
fossil first appeared
it was hailed as one of the most
important finds of the decade.
It's very, very hard to describe
that feeling of discovery.
It's, it's like walking
to the top of Mount Everest.
Scientists said
it was the missing link
that supported one of the most controversial
theories in modern palaeontology.
This is enormous.
I mean for anybody who has devoted
their, their life to this science
it's hard to imagine anything
that could be more important.
Yet when they examined it
they found, buried within it,
something they had never expected.
My first reaction was not
necessarily disbelief, but...
Wait a minute.
It was disbelief,
it was total disbelief.
This is the story
of a mysterious fossil
that fooled some of the best
scientific brains in the world.
In spring 1999 a small wooden
box arrived in America.
It came in as hand baggage
labelled fragile after a six thousand
mile journey from China.
Inside was a new and unknown fossil.
It was destined for one of the biggest
and most important fossil fairs in the world.
Here thousands of fossils go on display.
Most are bought and sold
by local dealers
and small, private collectors,
but the new Chinese specimen
was different.
It was headed for a quiet
and exclusive part of the fair,
a small, private room
on an upper floor
away from the public gaze.
Only a few privileged dealers
with big money to spend
would be invited to see it.
One of them was
Florence McGovern.
We worked with a network of people
and within that network
there are fossils that are shared,
behind closed doors often,
because they're very
special fossils.
As soon as I came
in the door he said,
'Pete, you've got
to see something,
I've got something
really special to show you,'
and he opened up the drawer
and he pulled out the most unbelievable
fossil that I've ever seen.
I carried it out to the, the light of,
of the sunlight so that I could see it cross lit
and there were a number of beautiful teeth
in this skull and that was very exciting
and then we studied also the tail
that was a dinosaur, very dinosaur-like tail.
I got this incredible high feeling like
climbing to the top of Mount Everest.
It is the, the feeling of discovery, that wonderful
time when everything clicks into position.
Both McGovern and Larson thought
they could be looking
at one of the most important
fossils ever found,
a specimen that would prove,
beyond doubt,
one of the most controversial
theories in all of evolution:
that dinosaurs had
evolved into birds.
The idea that something
as graceful and slight as a bird
could have come
from a dinosaur
is one of the most
extraordinary ideas in evolution.
Dinosaurs didn't have feathers,
they didn't have wings
and they couldn't fly.
The theory goes back
to the mid-1800s
when Thomas Huxley,
one of Darwin's most fervent disciples,
examined a strange looking
fossil called Archaeopteryx.
It looked to him
like a dinosaur,
but it had one feature
never seen on a dinosaur before:
feathers.
Clearly looking at the skeleton
we have a dinosaur.
it had a long tail,
it had teeth in the jaws,
it had three clawed fingers,
it had three toes.
The only thing that identified it
as a bird were the feathers.
But this was good enough
for Huxley.
Basing his ideas heavily
on the existence of the feathers,
he argued that Archaeopteryx
was a half bird, half dinosaur.
He then advanced an extraordinary theory:
birds must have evolved from dinosaurs.
To many in the field it seemed
to show one of the great wonders of evolution.
As far as I'm concerned
Archaeopteryx is one of the most
important scientific discoveries ever made.
When it was discovered it was quite
clear right from the beginning
that you had this combination of characters and it
showed a bridge between birds and dinosaurs.
Yet the theory is very controversial
and many scientists think
Huxley simply got it wrong.
One of them is leading bird
palaeontologist Professor Larry Martin.
The evidence for bird dinosaurs and
this just isn't my conclusion alone.
There are a number of people,
in fact almost all the people
who work on fossil birds agree with me,
is that when we look at these characters closely
we find the evidence that birds are
related to dinosaurs is not very solid.
It's sort of like someone should
say that you or I are related
because my big toe looks
a little bit like your nose.
The objectors returned again
and again to the same point:
how could such a huge,
lumbering creature as a dinosaur
have ever sprouted wings
and taken to the air?
Huxley's supporters needed
to answer two critical questions.
First, how could a dinosaur
have started to fly,
but above all they needed to find
what palaeontologists call a transitional form,
a fossil that is
half bird, half dinosaur
and which shows the process of change
from one into the other actually taking place.
It's become one of the most
sought after fossils in palaeontology.
At the fossil fair Pete Larson
couldn't believe his luck.
It looked as though
he was holding the very fossil
palaeontologists had been hoping
to find for so long.
This fossil, this clearly cross
between a bird and a dinosaur,
was, was what everybody
had been looking for
and here it was, right there, right in front of my eyes
and I was one of the first people to see it.
I looked it over very carefully,
literally under a magnifying glass,
and I was looking
for any telltale features,
particularly on the tail.
I wanted to look at that tail very carefully
because it was clearly, clearly a dinosaur tail.
In front of him, scarcely visible
among the fractures in the rock,
was an animal
nobody had ever seen before.
It had the unmistakeable head
and body of a primitive bird,
it had bird-like legs
and what looked like feathers,
but it had a very clear
dinosaur-like tail.
Here was the transitional animal,
half bird, half dinosaur, palaeontologists
had been searching for for 150 years.
It sold for $80,000.
Within weeks news of the new fossil
reached Washington
and the offices
of the National Geographic Society.
It's one of the most venerable
and influential learned societies in America.
Its magazine is the most widely read
educational journal in the world.
A new evolutionary missing link
was just the sort of story it specialises in.
Dinosaurs themselves are inherently
interesting to almost everyone
from whether you're four years old,
or 104 years old and anything that,
that promises to have such an interest
as gee whiz, you mean crows in my backyard
may be a direct descendant of dinosaurs.
Well of course that's something that people
are going to be interested in.
The magazine was already planning
an article on the evolution of birds.
Now it had a major scoop.
The new fossil provided
fresh and powerful evidence
which would turn the story
into a ground breaking report.
As more and more information
came in about this specimen
and, and people began to recognise
that this might indeed be the missing link
and a very important element
in the history of palaeontology,
in the history of the world,
there was a great deal of excitement.
That's pretty dark...
This is enormous.
I mean for anybody who has devoted
their, their life to this science
it's hard to imagine anything
that could be more important.
But excitement was not enough.
If the fossil really did answer
one of the biggest riddles in evolution
the magazine had to be
100% sure of its facts.
The magazine agreed to fund
the scientific analysis of the fossil
in return for exclusive press coverage.
It turned to some of the best people
in the business.
The fossil was about to undergo the most thorough
investigation modern science could throw at it.
Dr Philip Currie is one
of the world's top palaeontologists.
He's spent a lifetime scouring remote corners
of the world in search of dinosaur remains.
For him the new fossil promised the end
of a lifelong search for Huxley's missing link
and the opportunity
to learn more about
one of the most intriguing groups
of animals ever to roam the earth.
People like dinosaurs.
I mean you get fascinated
by them when you're very young,
you think they're wonderful animals.
Kids I think love dinosaurs because
they represent so many superlatives.
They're the biggest animals,
the heaviest animals,
the most bizarre animals
and they ruled the world for so long.
Currie now became the most
influential member of the investigative team.
Every fossil find is normally accompanied
by a set of explanatory notes
listing where and how
it was collected,
information which will help
date and authenticate it,
but the new fossil had none of this.
The scientific process includes
not just the collection of specimens,
but also the collection of data and that data
collection is very, very important to scientists.
Sometimes the data is more important
than the specimen itself,
so when you acquire a specimen
where you don't have information
on who collected it,
where it was collected exactly,
how it was collected,
there's no photographs,
there's no field sketches,
then you have to be
a little bit more suspicious.
Without the usual background notes
this was going to be an unusually
difficult specimen to interpret.
All they had to go on
was the fossil itself.
To make it easier to see
specialists were employed to cut away
the background rock and expose the skeleton.
Currie needed to know the shape and size
of the bones and how they all fitted together.
Only then would it be possible to judge
what sort of animal this really was.
We felt that we had to know
what was going on
and so we examined all the different pieces
of the specimen to see how they went together
and whether in fact we had contact between
the front and the back of each bone.
The work was made more difficult
because the fossil had been badly fractured
when it was taken out of the earth.
The examination took several months,
but as they slowly peeled away
the surrounding rock
the ghost of the pieces
of the skeleton began to emerge.
There was a bird-like head,
the body and arms were also
unmistakeably those of a bird,
but the legs looked as though
they belonged to a dinosaur-like creature
and the bones of the tail were fused
together to form the short, rigid tail
typical of a ground living dinosaur.
Their best guess suggested it was
a bird-like creature from the pelvis up
and a dinosaur from the pelvis down.
They called it Archaeoraptor,
or ancient hunter.
In Washington the deadline
for the article was approaching,
yet with the scientists still uncertain exactly
how the different parts of the skeleton fitted together
National Geographic agreed
to fund further research.
I can tell you as, as a journalist
who's done other stories for the magazine
that the, the fact checking
at National Geographic
is absolutely the most rigorous
I've ever been put through.
They go to the most extraordinary lengths
to check out the authenticity
of virtually every word
that appears in the magazine.
With only weeks before publication,
the Archaeoraptor was booked in
for one of the most sophisticated examinations
currently available to palaeontology.
In August 1999 it arrived at the CAT
scan laboratory of the University of Texas.
It's arguably the best equipped
palaeontology laboratory in the world.
Here equipment used for probing the human body
has been adapted for use on fossils.
It's run by Professor Tim Rowe,
who has built a pioneering reputation for his work.
The technology allows him to build
a digital model of a fossil
so that each and every bone
can be clearly seen.
It's as if you had a loaf of bread
and you stacked the loaf of bread up
and one by one by one
you were slicing it up,
so we can see the specimen from inside out
as if we'd physically cut it open,
but the process is entirely non-destructive.
The first thing Rowe produced
was an overall image of the fossil,
a hazy ghost-like picture.
He then digitally enhanced it
so that the skeleton was clearly visible.
What we have here is
a very interesting specimen.
Here's the skull.
This is the tip of the snout here
and the brain case is here
and the skull is twisted back
in a rigor mortis posture.
This means is that the top is here,
the bottom is here
and here is the neck.
It's twisted back in this characteristic
death posture that many fossils exhibit
and it's lying on its back
with one arm over itself,
the other arm off to the side.
Here's the shoulder,
here's the elbow,
here's the wrist.
The wrist is cocked, looks
like this animal had wings
and yet we see a little, tiny claw
on the end of this finger.
Very strange thing to see in a bird.
Here's the thigh bone,
the knee,
there's the shin,
here's the ankle,
here's the foot and the various toes
have slightly come apart down here
and then finally juxtaposed against
that is this tail unlike any other bird tail,
tail that had only been seen
in a non-flying dinosaur.
That was startling, it was very unusual
to see this combination of characters
and we wondered well,
what's going on here.
Rowe was keen to find out
more about this curious creature,
but the investigation,
as far as National Geographic was concerned,
suggested the Archaeoraptor was
everything that was claimed for it.
In Autumn 1999 National Geographic
published its article in a blaze of publicity.
The fossil of Archaeoraptor found
its way from China to Utah
and fortunately it did end up in the care
of people whose knowledge of dinosaurs
helped them quickly realise
what a find it is.
It is a true missing link
between dinosaurs and birds that could fly.
Here was the missing link. There's,
there's no better term for it.
This was going to, to rewrite palaeontology,
was going to rewrite history,
it was going to, it was going to say
to the few sceptics out there
that all your doubt about birds evolving from
land-bound dinosaurs are now worth nothing.
A 150 year old riddle
seemed to have been solved.
Yet on the other side of the world
something even more extraordinary
was about to unfold.
Xu Xing is a Chinese palaeontologist
who specialises in dinosaurs.
He'd been at the National Geographic
press conference in America
and been fascinated by what he saw.
When I came back from the US
I was very excited
because I'd seen an important fossil
that had come from China.
It was a very significant specimen
and I wanted to know
a lot more about it.
Xu Xing knew that
if he could find another specimen
he might be able to learn more
about this mysterious creature.
It had come from the Liaoning
region in Northern China,
one of the richest
fossil areas in the world.
The rock here is formed
by layers of volcanic ash
which over 130 million years ago buried
a wetland that had teemed with wildlife.
It's created perfect conditions
for preserving even the most delicate creatures.
We've discovered a huge number
of fossils: dinosaurs, birds and others.
They are very common
in Liaoning province.
They are all fantastically
well preserved.
Some have got skin on them still.
In some cases even the intestines
and internal organs have been preserved.
These are incredibly precious
and rare specimens,
saved by the unique nature
of the rock here.
There are a large number of them.
Xu Xing now began to search the area.
It's peppered with dig sites.
The search dragged on for two months.
It was like looking
for a needle in a haystack,
but nobody had seen anything
like the Archaeoraptor.
One of the best sources
of information is local farmers
who are paid by China's
geological institutions
to spend up to six months
of the year digging and sifting rock.
I contacted farmers
and asked if they'd seen anything
with the body of a bird
and a tail of a dinosaur.
A lot of them have got
private stores of fossils
and I thought maybe we'll be lucky
and somebody will have something similar.
But again nobody had seen anything.
Xu Xing kept moving.
He even scoured some
of the disused dig sites.
The search was going nowhere,
but then he got a message.
I heard from a farmer that he'd found
something similar to Archaeoraptor,
so I went to his house.
It was very exciting.
Life in the region's villages is harsh
and many farmers don't just dig for fossils,
they've become amateur dealers.
They've been responsible for bringing
to light a number of important finds.
Xu Xing was directed
to a small house.
Here, in a dark room,
on a pile of wooden boxes,
the farmer had laid out
a small and cracked specimen.
There was no head and upper body
and yet it seemed to look
similar to the Archaeoraptor.
As far as he could see with the naked eye
it had the same dinosaur-like tail.
He could just about make out
the trace of a feather.
It looked very promising,
but it would need
more detailed examination.
Back in Beijing Xu Xing
headed for his laboratory.
Here he compared his new find with photographs
of the Archaeoraptor specimen in America.
The more he looked,
the more the two specimens looked alike.
The new fossil was very incomplete,
but what there was suggested
he really had found another Archaeoraptor.
This is a picture of the Archaeoraptor.
When I compared it with the tail
of the new fossil they were a very similar length.
The new fossil had a slightly longer tail
than the Archaeoraptor's,
but we knew something
was missing from it.
When you allow for this
the tails looked very similar.
In fact the tails were
virtually identical
except for the missing piece
from the National Geographic specimen.
The more he looked the more uncanny
the match appeared to be.
There is the crack along
the tail of the new fossil.
You can see that there is a very similar crack
along the Archaeoraptor's tail.
The crack ran beside both tails
in exactly the same place
and for exactly the same distance.
It was even the same width.
There was something else, too.
Both the slabs have also got an identical
yellow dotted line running beside the tail.
It was the same yellow stain
on both fossils
and it was in the same place.
Xu Xing realised he'd almost certainly stumbled
on something much more than mere coincidence.
The rock in this region of China is made up
of hundreds of layers of tightly compressed sediment.
As it's dug up it splits apart.
When this happens fossils trapped
in the sediment can split down the middle,
some bones sticking
to one side of the fracture,
some to the other.
Some even split in half attaching
to both sides of the fracture.
The two pieces are known as the slab
and the counterslab of the fossil.
There are a series of small and even
holes along the two sides of the tail.
Some are concave, some are convex.
They are the results of the rock splitting in two
and if you put them together you
will find they are a perfect match.
It seemed an extraordinary piece of luck.
The two tails didn't just look the same, they were the same.
It was one tail split down the middle.
The evidence was overwhelming.
I was now 100% sure that the two tails
had come from the same fossil.
By an almost unbelievable coincidence
Xu Xing had found not
another Archaeoraptor,
but the counterslab
of the National Geographic specimen.
Yet as he moved up
from the tail to the pelvic region
there was something
very mysterious.
The pelvises of the two fossils
should have been identical,
but they were completely different.
The Archaeoraptor's was
small and damaged.
The new fossil's was
large and intact
and showed two hind legs which were
very different from the Archaeoraptor's.
It made no sense.
He compared them again.
The photos of the Archaeoraptor showed
a clear fracture between the tail and the pelvis
which didn't exist on the new fossil.
As Xu Xing studied the two specimens
an awful realisation dawned on him.
There could only be one explanation.
Somebody had glued a different head and upper body
onto the tail of the National Geographic specimen.
It was a fake.
Xu Xing emailed National Geographic
in Washington.
I'm very sorry to tell you
that I am now 100% certain
that the fossil you have is a composite
made from more than one specimen.
The news of the fake came
as a thunderbolt to National Geographic.
Could it be that the most popular educational
magazine in the world had got its facts wrong?
The magazine had never faced
such humiliation in its 113 year history.
My first reaction was not
necessarily disbelief, but...
Wait a minute.
It was disbelief,
it was total disbelief.
Allen was beside himself. He was furious,
he was livid, he was hurt,
he was angry in ways that, that are
almost unimaginable because it wasn't
as though they just buried this somewhere
in the back of the publication.
It was a big, important story and now
he's been told you've been had.
Allen's first instinct was to question
whether Xu Xing could possibly be right.
How could the magazine,
after so much costly checking by some
of the best brains in the business,
have made such a mistake?
He asked the magazine's advisers
to urgently recheck their research.
At the University of Texas Tim Rowe
had continued to examine his data.
The fossil had always puzzled him
and the CAT scan had thrown up some serious
questions about how the fossil fitted together.
I'm going to show you two slices.
The first is this slice here
through the skull
and these other elements here
and the second slice would be back
through the ankle and through the tail,
through this critical region here,
through one of the legs
and when we go to these slices
here's what we see.
Here's the skull
and you can see the skull
is part of this upper layer of shale
and with this you can see
the fracture pattern here.
Here's a very tight fractures
that fit together,
here a pair of curved fractures,
one fitting against the next.
A straight fracture,
the pieces on either side are
the same thickness, they're the same density,
but when we get out here
to the very edge of the block
this piece is a little bit thicker
than the piece it's glued against.
It's also a little denser
than the piece it's glued against.
Now as we move down to the tail,
to the critical area,
we can see that it's
completely surrounded by grout
and that there are
no natural ties
between the tail piece and this piece
to the right or this piece to the left.
I guess it's just swimming
in this ocean of grout here
and as we map
through the entire specimen
we found that there were
no verifiable fits between the tail
and any of the other parts
anywhere else in the specimen.
The scan clearly showed
what the naked eye couldn't see.
There was no natural skeletal link
between the all important tail
and the rest of the fossil.
It had simply been
glued on with grout.
Rowe says that he'd long
suspected the fossil was a fake,
but for reasons that
are not clear to this day,
the message had never got
through to National Geographic.
Rowe now put all his data together.
It wasn't just the tail
that had been tacked on to the fossil.
We saw that the thigh bone
had been glued in.
Then the two shin bones,
or the tibias, had been glued in
and as we looked at these more carefully
we could see that one was a slab
and the other was the counterslab
of the same specimen.
It was a single, it was a single
leg bone that had been split
and both halves had been glued in to make it
look as though right and lefts were naturally present
and the same was also true
of the feet.
The feet are mirror images
of one another.
They'd been split and glued in.
It's a single foot,
but it had been glued in to make it
look as if it were right and left feet
and there was a boundary
almost like the San Andreas Fault
line running through this specimen
where pieces that fit
very tightly together
were juxtaposed against pieces
that didn't fit very well together.
Scientists now constructed a model
of how the fake had been put together.
The head and upper body were
from an unknown bird-like creature.
The tail came from a small,
unidentified dinosaur
and the shin bones were almost
certainly from yet another animal,
again unidentified,
and the feet were probably
from a fourth.
The scans had confirmed
Xu Xing's finding.
The Archaeoraptor was indeed a fake.
Across America National Geographic faced
a very public barrage of embarrassing headlines.
The magazine blamed its advisers
for letting it down.
It's a question of betrayed
trust in many ways.
When you have scientists who are considered
the best in the world in their field,
you work with them in a collegial
fashion you expect straight answers.
We had had no indication
of any problem from the scanning.
We'd had no indication of any problem
from anyone who had looked at the preparation
and we had no indication of any problem
from the scientists that we were relying on as well.
Currie remembers things
slightly differently.
Clearly there was a bit
of a problem with communication
where we were saying things
that weren't always picked up
and yet we thought
they were being picked up.
But one thing Currie did make clear was his
regret at ever getting involved in the project.
Phil Currie wrote me a personal; letter of apology
and said this was the worst mistake of his career.
Everybody involved was, was trying
to make up for mistakes, to shift blame and,
and to, to make themselves look as good as
possible under a very uncomfortable
and disconcerting set of circumstances. In the end,
as far as I'm concerned, nobody looked good.
The scientists faced
a double embarrassment.
The fake had thrown into question the whole idea
of a relationship between birds and dinosaurs.
An important evolutionary theory
had been rocked to its core.
The whole debate about the origin
of birds from dinosaurs
has reached monumental
levels in recent years
and the amount of publicity
for it has been quite amazing
and I think that when this mistake,
so called mistake,
was realised of course people
who didn't want birds to come from dinosaurs
were able to exploit that
and say they'd finally got victory.
The effect of Archaeoraptor
has largely been just simply to demonstrate
that people that believe
strongly in an idea
can be easily fooled
and as a result of that
it becomes far more credible
that they have made
a lot of mistakes.
That has a huge effect on the credibility
of people who say that birds are dinosaurs.
One of the grandest theories
in evolution
was firmly back
in the file marked 'unsolved'.
Questions like how dinosaurs
had evolved into creatures that could fly
seemed as unanswerable as ever,
but the story was about
to take another new turn.
In the aftermath it became clear
that the Liaoning region of China
is not just famous
for its fabulous fossils.
It's also home to a highly
developed faking industry.
Dr Zhonge Zhou, a scientist at Beijing's
Institute of Palaeontology, has been monitoring it.
Farmers or dealers can make
a much bigger profit
if they've got the fossil
of a complete animal.
They take a damaged specimen
and add the parts from other animals
to make a new one
which looks complete.
In one place I saw them putting all the bits
from a dinosaur's leg into a box,
just like a box
of machine spare parts
so that they could add them
to different fossils.
A whole fossil, even one put
together from different creatures,
sells for far more
than a genuine but damaged specimen.
A damaged fossil might sell
for a few hundred yuan,
but when broken bits are used to make
a complete one it can sell for several thousand.
It was from these murky origins
that the Archaeoraptor had emerged.
Somewhere an expert had put together
a fake that had fooled the world.
Rowe believes it could only have been made
by a mastermind who knew exactly what he was doing.
I don't believe this was built by a, a humble
Chinese farmer, I believe that this passed
through hands of someone in a very
privileged scientific position.
The specimen was glued together in such a way that
there are no duplications of parts and it's done
in a very convincing way, so this is a person that
has anatomical knowledge and that knew
how to build a skeleton that looked like
a real skeleton,
so it's someone that has an academic background
and that knew how to construct a clever transitional form.
but in his urge to make a quick profit
the faker, for all his skill,
had completely missed the real value
of what he had.
In Beijing Xu Xing had begun to examine the counterslab
of the National Geographic specimen's tail.
He was curious to know what he'd got.
It was incomplete and damaged,
but he could clearly see the short,
rigid tail of a dinosaur,
but there was something
very surprising.
The remains of the pelvis suggested
it was the smallest dinosaur ever found.
Even more unusually, it showed signs
of having the feathers of a bird
and the light and spindly legs suggested
a creature adapted to climbing and perching
rather than running along the ground.
To Xu Xing this looked like the first dinosaur
ever found that could live in trees.
This is the original artist's impression
based on the initial research.
You can see this was a dinosaur
with a very small bird-like body,
but there's also something else
very important about the skeleton.
The hind legs suggests that this
may have been a dinosaur that lived in trees.
This was a new and completely
unknown creature
and contained within it
evolutionary data never found before.
Here was an animal that had evolved
into something more like a bird
than any dinosaur
previously known about.
The interesting thing is that this fossil
is not only the closest to a bird-dinosaur ever found,
it also provides the first fossil evidence
that some dinosaurs may have lived in trees.
It even seemed to offer a clue
to one of the most difficult questions
thrown up by the bird-dinosaur theory:
how had dinosaurs turned
into creatures that could fly?
If they had lived in trees
then it wasn't such a big evolutionary hop
to developing a mechanism for flight.
Xu Xing's specimen had a number
of very significant indicators
which marked it as a missing link
between dinosaurs and birds.
It may turn out to be one of the most
significant finds of recent years.
In America, something equally
astonishing was coming to light.
The other half of the fake fossil was throwing up
more fascinating and unexpected results.
As Tim Rowe studied
the head and body
he could see that it was clearly
the skeleton of a bird.
These bones all go together.
This is a natural,
verifiable new skeleton.
It's a unique combination
of characters with a big breast bone,
a big wishbone,
a flight capable wing
and yet it retains claws
and moving up to the skull up here
we find that it still has teeth.
This was an extraordinary
combination of features.
Birds don't have
teeth or hands,
yet this creature
had the hands of a dinosaur
and the wings of a bird.
It also had the teeth of a dinosaur
but the beak of a bird.
It was another brand new animal
scientists had never heard of or seen before.
This was the most powerful flyer
ever found in early Cretaceous rocks
and yet this is an animal
that had teeth.
Interesting combination of characters
that we'd never seen before in a bird,
so it was startling,
it was, it was interesting to see
these strange combinations of characters
and it's, it's possible that this could
have been a transitional form.
In other words the head and upper body of the forged
fossil was another remarkable specimen.
Extraordinarily here was another creature
in transition between dinosaurs and birds,
a second link in the chain
between the two species.
We haven't found anything
like this yet.
It shows us the antiquity
of the modern flight device.
I, I predict that this specimen will play an important role
in understanding the history of modern birds.
The fake fossil was a commercial fraud
but a scientific goldmine.
The upper portion was
a bird with dinosaur features
and the tail was a dinosaur
with bird-like characteristics.
It was not one,
but two creatures
showing all the evolutionary characteristics
of a missing link.
Both of these specimens
are scientifically significant
and they were nearly lost
to science
and two scientifically significant
specimens were combined
into one deceptive whole in the favour
of the greater commercial value of that whole.
It may be that we really can now say
that dinosaurs evolved into birds
and that one of the most important theories
in evolution has finally been proved.
If that's true it radically alters
our perception of the fate of the dinosaur family.
What it means is that dinosaurs
in the end were not failures.
Dinosaurs were animals that did give rise
to another group of animals: birds.
They're still incredibly
successful animals today
and in fact under modern biological
or palaeontological classification
we would consider birds
as part of the dinosauria.
The faked fossil sold
in 1999 for $80,000.
It seemed at the time
an enormous sum of money.
Today it's back in China
and valued at over $1m.
A fossil that once fooled the world
is now helping science unravel
one of the biggest mysteries in evolution.
Converted into subtitles by m06166