November 9, 2020, 4:13 PM
Ecologist Jeremy Fox at the University of Calgary offers a list of scientific frauds, with Piltdown Man at the top of the list. Writing at his blog Dynamic Ecology, he remarks, “Gonna be hard to top this one, I think.” Is it? From, “What’s the ‘greatest’ scientific fraud of all time?”
Quote:
Charles Dawson (it almost certainly was him) faked actual fossils rather than, say, numbers in a spreadsheet. Although he didn’t fool everyone, he fooled enough people (including some of the leading paleontologists of the day) to appreciably influence research on human evolution. The fraud wasn’t definitively exposed until more than 40 years had passed. By way of comparison, think of the fake “Archaeoraptor” fossil from a few years ago — it only fooled a fossil collector and a few people associated with National Geographic, and was exposed within weeks.
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