RE: Archaeopterix? What Archaeopterix....?!

[cnedin@geology.adelaide.edu.au (Chris Nedin)]

The forgery claims of Hoyle et al. have been thoroughly debunked, See:

Charig, A.J. et al. (1986) _Archaeopteryx_ is not a forgery. Science, 232:
622-626.

The most damning refutations were:

-The claim from Hoyle et al. that the two halves of the specimen did not
fit together when closed like a book was shown to be false

-The presence of small veins of calcite (which show up under UV light)
crosscutting both the bone *and* the feather impressions.

-The lack of any evidence for a thin layer of 'cement" on top of the slab
when looked at in cross section

For an on-line discussion of this, access the talk.origins archive for "On
_Archaeopteryx_, Astronomers and Forgery" at:

http://rumba.ics.uci.edu:8080/faqs/archaeopteryx-forgery.html

Copies available on request.

>1) Owen did no do it himself, he let someone in Germany do it.

There was absolutely no reason for Owen to do this. It was on his
insistance that the Natural History Museum buy the specimen (along with
over a 1000 other fossils) and he did the first published detailed
description of the fossil. If the specimen was subsequently exposed as a
forgery, it would have been Owen's reputation which would have been ruined.
Why would Owen set the stage for his own ruination????
The reason could not have been to discredit evolution, since Owen believed
that evolution had occurred - though he was opposed to Darwin's version.

>>besides what do astronomers know about geology or paleontology?
>
>Is that relevant. Read the book. They objections they have about the fakes
>(let's call them that) seem correct. And they _are_ scientists, and they did
>do a lot of research, or at least so it seems, judging from the book.

No the research was minimal, done on a cursory viewing of the specimen and
on grainy black and white photographs of the specimen taken with a *hand
held* 35 mm SLR camera.

>>had that been written by a geochemist or sedimentologist, it might be
>>a believable hypothesis.
>
>It has little to do with geochemistry or sedimentologie, I think.

Geochemistry and sedimentology have everything to do with it. Sedimentology
explains why the slabs split the way they do and shows that the specimen
lay of a bedding plane for some period before being covered. Geochemisty
explains how the feather impressions became fossilized (see Davies P.G. &
Briggs, D.E.G. 1995 Fossilization of feathers. Geology, 23: 783-786))

Chris

cnedin@geology.adelaide.edu.au                  nedin@ediacara.org
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Many say it was a mistake to come down from the trees, some say
the move out of the oceans was a bad idea. Me, I say the stiffening
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it was all downhill from there.