Richard Collins: Fakes, hoaxes... and weird and wonderful reality

The fossil of one Europe’s oldest reptiles was outed as a partial forgery by a team led by Valentina Rossi of University College Cork

Dr Valentina Rossi with an image of Tridentinosaurus antiquus as the 280-million-year-old reptile fossil that has puzzled researchers for decades is mostly fake, scientists have concluded. An analysis of the remnants of the creature, dubbed Tridentinosaurus antiquus, has revealed the material that was thought to be well-preserved, ancient soft tissue is, in fact, just black paint. Picture: Zixiao Yang/University College Cork/PA Wire

Let us hope that it is not true, but if it is, that it won’t become widely known — the wife of the Bishop of London on Darwinian evolution

To claim that humans are descended from ape-like creatures was heresy. Palaeontologists, it was thought, hadn’t found, nor would they ever find, the so-called ‘missing link’.