How to Tell If a Dinosaur Is Fake
On Wednesday, a team of scientists unveiled a newly discovered dinosaur that had the body and sickle-clawed feet of Velociraptor, the head and snout of a swan, and weird arms that were somewhere between grasping limbs and flattened flippers. This bizarre murder-swan, which the team christened Halszkaraptor, was so odd that when they first saw it, they suspected that it was a fake—a Frankensaur that had been assembled from parts of different dinosaurs. “All of us thought, when we first saw it: Oh come on now,” says Philip Currie from the University of Alberta.
But after using a particle accelerator to scan the animal, and the rock in which it is still encased, Currie and his colleagues are convinced that it’s the real deal.
Not everyone is so sure, though. When from the University of Edinburgh first saw a picture of , his spidey sense also started tingling. Its posture, from the curve of its tail to the, but its skull looked like one from a different dinosaur group—the . And most worryingly of all, the specimen has a convoluted history. It was poached from Mongolia (as many dinosaurs are), and smuggled into Japan and Britain, before ending up in a private collection in France—a meandering route that offered few reassurances and many chances for tampering.
