Fake spiders and paleontological forgery
A paper by paleontologist Paul Selden in Paleoentomology describes an interesting case of paleontological forgery: “The supposed giant spider Mongolarachne c...
All posts tagged with hoaxes
Some archaeological whoppers get the skewer treatment
Here’s a nice article about two archaeologists, Gayle Fritz and David Freidel, and their efforts to better educate the public and their students about critic...
Link: Buzzfeed Bigfoot longread
I’ve had this Buzzfeed article sitting on my stack for two months: “The Hunter, The Hoaxer, And The Battle Over Bigfoot”. For people interested in biological...
Random Scholar: "Plenty of genuine tails"
I was doing some research involving Aleš Hrdlička, and ran across this curious item published in Science in 1926 (“Human tails: a statement and correction”),...
Quote: Earnest Hooton on Piltdown
I’ve been flipping through Earnest Hooton’s Up From the Ape (1946 edition). It’s a remarkable book for many reasons. I’m almost transfixed by his discussion ...
P. T. Barnum's gorilla
In the course of my research for the ape strength article, I ran across an old piece from The Atlantic Monthly, in which Alexander Young gives a long satire ...