If I get the time I'll reasearch the hoax theory. If someone else has the time, just do a google search. It's there.
That's an interesting article but I understood that fossil was longed proved to a hoax and that Chinese villagers were gluing together and selling "feathered dinosaur" fossils to gullible Americans. What about that?
That's incorrect. There was one (1) case where a villager glued together two different specimens, and for a very short time (weeks) National Geographic (*not* science journals) overlooked the "red flags". And it wasn't Archaeopteryx -- there are multiple archie fossils from different geographical locations, and they've withstood all validity tests (plus they're whole, not fragmented). The same goes for the other transitional fossil birds. Here's a previous post of mine which describes what happened with the one bogus case:
(unlike Archaeoraptor which was a known hoax)
That's overstating the case. It's more accurate to say it was a fraud. And not by those evil(tm) evolutionists, either, as creationists like to imply. More than anything else, it was a comedy of errors.
The Chinese farmer who found the original specimen knew that it would sell for more money to fossil collectors if it was more complete, so he shaped and glued plausible (to him) pieces he had found nearby onto a broken specimen. He was just trying to make a buck, not hoax anyone into any particular scientific conclusion. He may have even believed that the parts belonged together.
It was eventually bought by a husband-wife team of semi-professional fossil collectors (dubbed "hobbyists" in some accounts), who decided they had something interesting and brought it to the attention of National Geographic magazine, hoping for fame and fortune. If it turned out to be significant, it could be their Big Break in the fossil community.
National Geographic normally doesn't publish new discoveries without first having them peer-reviewed in advance by scientists (even though, note, National Geographic is not itself a "scientific" publication). For various reasons they neglected to do so this time, and the result was egg on their faces.
Through a number of communication failures, red flags raised by several members of the team examining the specimen were not communicated to the right people (some of which were out in the field working on other projects), and eventually National Geographic went to press with an announcment of a new "discovery" that turned out to have been incorrectly assembled like a jigsaw puzzle. (Note: The fact that the specimen was glued together in several places was not itself a tip-off, since specimens are often broken into several pieces naturally prior to being discovered, or broken during recovery, and then glued together to retain their form.)
It was only a matter of weeks before the attention created by the publication resulted in a flood of scientists pointing out the obviously inauthentic nature of the specimen, and National Geographic published an embarrassed retraction and post-mortem analysis of how they had managed to screw up.
Significantly, the two *science* journals to which the fossil owners had submitted papers on the specimen (prior to the National Geographic publication) had rejected them. The journal Nature rejected it because National Geographic would not give them enough time to properly peer review the matter before NG's publication, and they would not print it without peer review (good for them, this is why peer-review is a critical scientific "reality check").
The paper was then submitted to the journal Science, which rejected it, saying they required more proof of Archaeoraptor's birdlike qualities. The paper was rewritten and resubmitted, and again rejected as inadequate.
So contrary to creationist claims about this debacle, 1) the fraud was perpetrated by a Chinese farmer out to make a buck, not an agenda-driven scientist, 2) the mass-market magazine National Geographic was responsible for the premature announcement of its alleged "missing link" status, not the science community nor science journals, 3) actual science journals rejected it, and 4) scientists were the first to identify it as a fraud as soon as they got a look at it.
Rather than being a story of science's alleged frauds or errors, it's actually a story of how self-correcting science is.
How and why were these Chinese villagers doing this in Germany? Enquiring minds want to know.