I should have heard of them if you have. I haven't. This is bull.
I should have heard of them if you have. I haven't. This is bull.
Perhaps you misunderstood my comment. There are a lot of fakes out there. Archeoraptor is unusual because it was actually examined by real paleontologists and passed for a while - even if begrudgingly. Normally, a bit of examination will show what the fossil was constructed from, but this pair of fossils was composed of two new types of creatures - a new bird, and a new dinosoar - which couldn't be immediately recognized.
Most of the time, these fake fossils are not available for examination, and so no one in the Western world even bothers to write about them. In the Archeoraptor case, the fossils used to make the composite are in and of themselves important examples, once they are separated - though one of the pieces was actually the counter-side to a fossil that was later available for study.
Discover Magazine (Interview): Ornithologist and Evolutionary Biologist Alan Feduccia Plucking Apart the Dino-Birds
So far, only one feathered dinosaur, Archaeoraptor, has been publicly acknowledged as a forgery. You think there are others?
Archaeoraptor is just the tip of the iceberg. There are scores of fake fossils out there, and they have cast a dark shadow over the whole field. When you go to these fossil shows, it's difficult to tell which ones are faked and which ones are not. I have heard that there is a fake-fossil factory in northeastern China, in Liaoning Province, near the deposits where many of these recent alleged feathered dinosaurs were found.
Journals like Nature don't require specimens to be authenticated, and the specimens immediately end up back in China, so nobody can examine them. They may be miraculous discoveries, they may be missing links as they are claimed, but there is no way to authenticate any of this stuff.
Why would anyone fake a fossil?
Money. The Chinese fossil trade has become a big business. These fossil forgeries have been sold on the black market for years now, for huge sums of money. Anyone who can produce a good fake stands to profit.
Now, why WOULD you hear a lot about dismissed forgeries? There are probably millions of forged paintings, but the only ones you hear about are the few that have been accepted as genuine by major experts and have sat in museums for a long time.