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Chinese Scientist Spots Mistake in Feathered Dinosaur Research
A prominent Chinese paleontologist announced on May 10 that a fossil regarded as an important indication of evolutionary links between dinosaurs and birds is just a composite of several different fossilized creatures.
"The tail of the animal introduced by National Geographic magazine belongs to a kind of theropod. Therefore, the dinosaur- like bird is a sheer fiction," said Xu Xing, a Ph.D. with the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology.
In a story titled "Feathers for T. Rex?" in its November 1999 issue, a National Geographic reporter said that "new bird-like fossils are missing links in dinosaur evolution."
Xu's dispute of the fossil called Archaeoraptor liaoningensis has been accepted by the National Geographic Society in the United States which publishes the magazine.
Furthermore, the society recently acknowledged their mistake publicly.
"The dispute aroused the close attentions of people both within and without academic circles," Xu said.
Excavated from a layer dated at 120 million years ago in northeast China's Liaoning Province, the fossil was smuggled out of China and sold to the Dinosaur Museum in Blanding, Utah.
Several world-famous scientists supported the research carried out by Stephen Czerkas, curator of the museum.
At a press conference organized by National Geographic for the new find, Xu and his colleague Wang Yuanqing, a researcher of the CAS institute, had the opportunity to closely observe the specimen and were suspicious of the fossil, which is broken between the bird's body and the tail.
"Although broken fossils are common in the field," Xu said, " when it was bought by Czerkas it lost much valuable archaeological information."
"Smugglers often manufacture fake fossils for economic gains," he said.
Researchers believe the fossil pieces were glued together by smugglers doing illegal business in China.
In November last year, Xu and other researchers happened to find a fossilized creature which has the same tail as the so- called Archaeoraptor liaoningensis. After careful study, Xu reported his find to the National Geographic Society.
Czerkas tried to find solid support for an evolutionary relationship between dinosaurs and birds, which became a hot topic worldwide.
"This fossil is perhaps the best evidence since Archaeopteryx that birds did, in fact, evolve from certain types of carnivorous dinosaurs," Czerkas was quoted as saying by National Geographic. Global scientists have been disputing the dinosaur-bird relationship for more then 100 years.
The find of a feathered dinosaur, Sinosauropteryx, from the same place in Liaoning stimulated another round of heated discussion.
National Geographic and the British academic journal Nature published reports and thesis on the topic several times.
Dong Zhiming, an authoritative dinosaur expert and also a researcher at the CAS institute, said, "All scientific discoveries must be based on real evidence."
In addition, Chinese scientists have once again proposed an effective international ban on fossil exporting and smuggling.
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