That's Piltdown Man. While it is often written that it took 40 or 50 years for Piltdown to be determined a fraud, its influence actually lasted only a few years.
The bones were found roughly 1908 through 1912, and the formal announcement was made in December, 1912.
By 1925, Edmonds had reported that there was a problem with the geology of the find.
Some researchers recognized early on that Piltdown didn't fit. Friedrichs and Weidenreich had both, by about 1932, published their research suggesting the lower jaws and molars were that of an orang (E.A. Hooton, Up from the Ape, revised edition; The MacMillan Co., 1946). So, within 20 years there were serious doubts, and Piltdown was increasingly ignored.
The hoax was formally demolished completely in 1953 (that's 41 years), but by then Piltdown was almost completely ignored in favor of the African specimens.
I suspect such a fraud now would be discovered and rooted out in far less time. The catalogue of fossils we have now presents a much clearer picture of the past than what they had to work with in 1912.
This point deserves to be emphasized. The reason it didn't fit is because evolution makes predictions about the kinds of evidence that ought to be found. In the case of Piltdown Man, it made no sense at all that the "missing link" (the popular term in those days) would be found in England -- an island with no fossil history of pre-human hominids. The fact that it was such an out-of-place anachronism suggests that whoever faked the fossil didn't understand very much about evolution.
The great virtue of a scientific theory is that it is devised to fit the evidence, and thus -- if the theory is good -- it provides a framework in which future evidence should also fit. And Piltdown Man didn't fit.
With creationism (or ID), there is no such reality check. Anything that shows up is the work of the designer, so a creationist (or ID devotee) has no reason to suspect any evidence at all.