Piltdown Man (Eoanthropus dawsoni)
... was regarded with much suspicion by scientists at the time. It was relagated to a dark closet for decades, resurrected when modern dating technologies were established and determined to be a fake. Turns out the most likely person responsible for the fakery was some RC priest from France.
Since Russ says he is abandoning the thread or FR, I will post a response here.
Some researchers recognized early on that Piltdown didn't fit. Friedrichs and Weidenreich had both, by about 1932, published their research suggesting (correctly) that the lower jaws and molars were that of an orang (E.A. Hooton, Up from the Ape, revised edition; The MacMillan Co., 1946). This is what a 1946 textbook shows, several years before the claims for Piltdown were completely falsified.
(Creationist websites--better than artificial respiration for keeping Piltdown Man alive! As if it meant anything.)