Archaeopteryx: The Primordial Bird -- A Case of Fossil Forgery H

Out Of Print... The dateline is Papenheim, Bavaria, 1861. A news story that shakes the World of museum experts: it is the discovery of a 160 million-year-old fossil of a feathered reptile supposedly found sprawling within a split block of limestone in a Bavarian quarry. This event occurred scarcely a year after Darwins publication of The Origins of Species, and only weeks after a famous Evolution versus Creation debate in Oxford where Bishop Wilberforce is alleged to have asked T. H. Huxley, Darwins Bulldog, whether he thought he was descended from the ape on his grandmothers side or his grandfathers side. The memory of this debate was still fresh in everyone's minds, as was the fact that a major issue causing some consternation that came up here related to the lack of fossil evidence for intermediate forms. The Papenheim news seemed to fill an important gap, supplying to the delight of evolutionists, a fossil form intermediate between reptiles and birds. Despite rumblings from German experts that this new fossil was a forgery, the then Director of the British Museum, Richard Owen, commissioned the purchase of the fossil without even seeing it for himself. A detailed photographic examination of the London fossil has now revealed it to be an unquestionable forgery. This evidence is presented here, including twenty startling photographic plates, some in colour. In this scientific detective story, inviting to both the layman and expert alike, the forgery is not only exposed by the authors, but also the culprit and his motive are discovered.