Saturday, November 5, 2011

Another hoax?

Nebraska Man. In 1922 Harold Cook discovered a single tooth in a river bed in Nebraska. Henry Fairfield Osborn, head of the American Museum of Natural History, declared it to be from a pithecanthropoid and named it Hesperopithecus harold cooki, thus America now had their own ape-man. England's prestigious Illustrated London News having a worldwide distribution, published a full reconstruction of the ape-man and his wife based upon this tooth. The ACLU was prepared to use this tooth as prime evidence in the famous Scopes trial in July 1925. By 1928 it was discovered that the tooth actually belonged to an extinct peccary or pig. This embarrment was compounded in 1972 when living herds of this same pig (Catagonus wagneri) were discovered in Paraguay and thus it was not even extinct!

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