The infamous fossil of "Archaeoraptor", a forged missing link.
The principal part of the "Archaeoraptor" fossil, which was first hailed as a missing link in evolutionary history and then revealed as a forgery, is actually a fish-eating bird, report Zhou Zhonghe and colleagues, of the Institute of Vertebrate Palaeontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Julia A. Clarke of the American Museum of Natural History in November 21 issue of Nature.
As remains of different animals pieced together, one part of the specimen has already been identified as a dinosaur tail from the Early Cretaceous period of China. What about the other parts? An early X-ray tomography examination suggested that the forgery could be formed of up to five specimens belonging to at least two species.However, after a morphological comparison with holotypes, the researchers find out that the remaining parts of the "Archaeraptor" are pieces of a single and almost complete specimen falling into the taxon of a single species Yanornis martini, a bird of Early Cretaceous, which was recently discovered feeding on fish. (Guo Haiyan)
A reconstruction of the new finding named "Yanornis martini".
