APRIL FOOLS' DAY PICTURES: Four Historic Science Hoaxes

nationalgeographic ^

[JoeProBono]

In 1912 scientists thought they'd discovered the elusive missing link between human and ape. Found in a gravel pit in Piltdown, England, a set of intriguing skull and jaw fragments were later reconstructed by the British Museum into a human-like head with an ape-like jaw.

In 1953 it turned out the find wasn't proof of anything—other than the skill of the still anonymous forger. The skull was a medieval human's. The jaw was an orangutan's. And the teeth were a chimp's.

[JoeProBono]

Cardiff Giant

In 1869 an astounding find was unearthed by a farmer and a cigar maker: a ten-foot-tall (three-meter-tall), 3,000-pound (1,360-kilogram) stone man buried near Cardiff, New York. The massive statue was an obvious hoax—experts said the giant, sculpted from gypsum, was of undoubtedly recent provenance. But the brothers made a bundle charging tourists 50 cents to view the "Cardiff Giant" nonetheless.

It's true that dinosaurs are related to birds. But one purported missing link turned out to be foul play. Archaeoraptor liaoningensis, a birdlike creature with the tail of a carnivorous dinosaur, was featured in National Geographic magazine and displayed at the National Geographic Society in Washington, D.C., in 1999.

But like Piltdown Man, the find proved too good to be true. What's now dubbed the Piltdown Chicken was a composite of fossils from two different creatures. National Geographic confirmed the mistake in April 2000.

Massive footprints in the snow spooked miners in the 1920s, who feared Sasquatch, or Bigfoot, was on their trail. But retired logger Rant Mullens admitted in 1982 that he'd helped perpetrate the legend by stamping giant footprints in the snow of Washington's Mount St. Helens using the carved wooden "feet" seen above.

On the right, a boy in 1975 holds a plaster cast his father, Mark Pettinger, believed to be a Sasquatch footprint found in Puyallup, Washington. Hoax—or not?

[Flycatcher]

You forgot to add “Man-made Global Warming” to the list.

[Keli Kilohana]

What about Man-made Catastrophes?

[MortMan]

Happy Obama Day to you, too!

[RegulatorCountry]

They’ve gotten much better since Piltdown. Now, entire species are created from a bone fragment the size of a dime.

[Flycatcher]

What about Man-made Catastrophes?

The California state legislature, sadly, is not a hoax...

[Westbrook]

>It’s true that dinosaurs are related to birds.

Really?

Let’s see.

* Lizards have a 3-chambered heart, birds have a 4-chambered heart.

* Lizards have solid bones, birds have hollow bones.

* Lizards are cold-blooded, birds are warm-blooded.

Of course, they have a lot of DNA in common, not only with eachother, but with us.

The evolutionists believe that is evidence of common ancestry.

I used to believe that.

Now I come to see it more as evidence of a common designer.

[stormer]

[stormer]

What makes you think that dinosaurs were lizards?

[Westbrook]

> What makes you think that dinosaurs were lizards?

Ah, sorry, reptiles.

And what makes you think they turned into birds?

[Skenderbej]

The April Fools turned out in November last year.

[RegulatorCountry]

Because of the meaning of the name, perhaps?

[stormer]

I would also provide these schematics. As you see the only substansial difference is the presence of a septum dividing the ventricals in the mammalian heart.

[Joe 6-pack]

While not a "scientific" hoax, I think an April Fool's Day salute is in order to my favorite forger of all times, Hans Van Meegeren. Van Meegeren painstakingly forged a number of Vermeer paintings, selling the fakes to the Nazi hierarchy including Hermann Goring. Following the war, Dutch officials sought to prosecute him for selling national treasures to the nazis, forcing him to admit to his acts of forgery for which he was tried and convicted instead.

Any guy who swindles nazis is good in my book :-)

Van Meegeren's "Christ at Emmaus" originally attributed to Vermeer

[Westbrook]

> the only substansial difference is the presence of a
> septum dividing the ventricals in the mammalian heart.

That’s ok. No need to explain. You and your fellow travellers can continue believing that the differences between dinosaurs and birds are trifling.

Just as long as you don’t require me by law to teach my children such nonsense.

[stormer]

Etymology is a poor substitute for physiology.

[a fool in paradise]

“Steel doesn’t burn!” - Rosie O’Donut

[smith288]

They found Goliath?

[a fool in paradise]

EDDIE!!!

[stormer]

I didn't say they were trifling, but a lot can happen in 65,000,000 years.

[RegulatorCountry]

Etymology is a poor substitute for physiology.

Did science have a poor understanding of Latin, hence the misleading etymology, or did science consider "dinosaurs" to actually have been lizards, stormer?

[MadMike58]

[stormer]

I’m certain there are those that would believe that.

[a fool in paradise]

forcing him to admit to his acts of forgery for which he was tried and convicted instead...

Did they prosecute everyone who lied to the Nazis? Idiots.

[Westbrook]

Maybe if I down a quart of gin and squint really hard, I might be able to see the dinoaur in that.

No sale.

[Scythian]

Don't forget ol' freezer boy ....

[calex59]

They’ve gotten much better since Piltdown. Now, entire species are created from a bone fragment the size of a dime.

Ahh, but you forget the fragment of a pig's tooth that was found in the US in the late 1800s and touted as coming from the "missing link". Drawings of the "man" and his "family" were made, until someone unearthed the rest of the pig. It was an ancient pig, but a pig nonetheless.

[evets]

[a fool in paradise]

Was he Jewish? < /sarc >

Islamists proclaim that Jews are the offspring of pigs and monkeys.

[Scythian]

THUNDERBIRDS

[Oztrich Boy]

>It’s true that dinosaurs are related to birds.

Really?

Let’s see.

* Lizards have a 3-chambered heart, birds have a 4-chambered heart.

Just one flaw in your reasoning.

Dinosaurs were not lizards. After birds their closest living relatives are crocodilains = four chambered heart

[Lancey Howard]

I love those pictures.

[stormer]

Greek, actually. here's a picture of my favorite scarab beetle, Enema hope. Go figure.

[houeto]

Man! Sure didn’t take very long for your thread to get hijacked. Could have been fun. I’m outta here.

[Joe 6-pack]

"Did they prosecute everyone who lied to the Nazis? Idiots."

Unfortunately, the Nazis were not the only demographic he defrauded...although I kind of think of him as a very sympathetic character, and certainly a master technician in his own right as a painter. I suppose a loose parallel could be drawn with the American mafioso who assisted in intelligence gathering in Italy during the war. They did a service to their nation in the time of war, but their motives tended to be in service of their own interests rather than for any grand patriotic reasons.

[stormer]

Really?

[Westbrook]

> Dinosaurs were not lizards. After birds their closest
> living relatives are crocodilains = four chambered heart

OK, let’s see if I’ve got this straight.

Dinosaurs are more closely related to creatures that have hollow bones, feathers, and fly than they are to scale-covered, solid-boned reptiles that walk on all fours.

Like I said.

You can believe and teach what you want.

Just extend the same courtesy to me.

[JoeProBono]

[RegulatorCountry]

Always wondered about those. Is there a provenance for the photos that could authenticate? If so, was the “pterodactyl” known in that era? It looks to be immediate post-Civil War, maybe a popular newspaper sensation at the time? The “wings” are suspiciously formed in the first pic. The rest, hard to say.

[Westbrook]

Oh, please.

Flying reptiles are no more related to birds than are bats.

But if you want to think so, have at it.

[Oztrich Boy]

Just extend the same courtesy to me.

Sure. You believe Chiroptera are birds if you like.

[stormer]

[stormer]

Reptiles with feathers?

[Westbrook]

> You believe Chiroptera are birds if you like.

When pigs fly.
:)

Chiroptera are mammals and are far more closely related to other mammals than they are to birds.

Just as dinosaurs are more related to reptiles than they are to birds.

[Oztrich Boy]

"Flying reptiles " Did you just identify the Urvogel Archaeopteryx as a reptile?

Cdesign proponentsists, without exception, claim it is 100% bird.

You should stop digging

[Westbrook]

> “Flying reptiles “ Did you just identify the Urvogel Archaeopteryx as a reptile?

Yes, of course, put words in my mouth. Just like the Left does. It appears to me that the tactics of the evolutionists very closely parallel those of the Left.

Pteradactyl was no archaeopteryx, and it’s just not the ID folks that qualify archaeopteryx as a bird.

[Oatka]

Don't forget my favorite, the "Lost Tribe" of Tasadays that the scientific community, and eco-nuts, were wetting themselves over.

As an example of their willing gullibility, from that site:

Disclosure - In 1986, nearly 15 years after the Tasaday were first discovered, everything changed. General Marcos's tyrannous regime was ousted and a new, freer, democratic government took its place.

A Swiss writer and Anthropologist named Oswald Iten took advantange of the opportunity to study the Tasaday without the former government's restrictions. He brought Joey Lozano, a journalist from South Cotabato, with him on his expedition. Strangely, when they reached the caves, they found them deserted. A search of the surrounding area led to the discovery of the same "Stone Age" people a short distance away living in modest huts, wearing T-shirts and blue jeans.

Iten and Lozano realized that the whole thing was a glorious hoax. Further research showed that the Tasaday actually came from two other tribes, tribes that had been part of the modern world for years. They publicized their findings through an ABC television documentary entitled The Tribe that Never Was. Millions of viewers were confronted with the images of Filipinos in T-shirts and Levi's laughing at the pictures of themselves from National Geographic. One anthropologist called the Tasaday, "rain forest clock punchers" who were "cave people" by day and went home to their families at night.

In retrospect, the fraud seemed obvious. Why, some wondered, were the caves so clean? Even a Stone Age tribe would have had garbage, such as crab shells or scraps of food. And how did such a small tribe avoid inbreeding? Also, the Tasaday were a mere three hours walk from an modern village. It seemed odd that they would not have encountered this village while searching for food. And if that was not enough evidence of a hoax, anthropologist, Thomas Headland conducted an investigation on the Tasaday and produced "eight little known facts about the Tasaday." These were:
1. The Tasaday were found wearing commercially manufactured cloth. They were asked to remove their clothes and wear their "traditional" garb.
2. The Tasaday must have traded with other tribes. They had brass, metal tipped arrows, bows made of cultivated bamboo, glass beads, iron knives, and tin cans, just to name a few of the foreign items that Headland mentions.
3. Nearby tribes ate meat from animals killed by the Tasaday, and gave them cultivated food in return.
4. The South Cotabato rain forest lacks the amount of starch foods necessary to sustain the Tasaday. Headland writes, "It has been generally assumed until recently that tropical rain forests are food-rich biomes for human foragers, and that prehistoric hunter-gatherers once lived completely independent of cultivated foods in such environments. An alternative hypothesis that such forests are actually food-poor for humans is proposed here. Specifically, that wild starch foods such as yams were so scarce and so hard to extract that human foragers could not have lived in such biomes without recourse to cultivated foods...."
5. The Tasaday were never directly observed subsisting on gathered food. Scientists simply assumed they did.
6. The Tasaday bamboo tools were cultivated bamboo. Their bamboo was the sun-loving type which cannot grow in the rain forest.
7. The Tasaday stone tools were fake. They were made at the request of the officials in charge.
8. In the Tasaday language, 85% of the words were identical to the Cotabato Manobo speech, which is spoken by most of the tribes in the area.

[RegulatorCountry]

Right off the top, shadow definition gives that one away. But, science has never stood to gain from propagating the notion of giant locusts, either, so there’s another reason to discredit the photo, even if the hoaxers had had better photo manipulation skills.

[Scythian]

Praying Mantis captures Humming Bird

[JoeProBono]