Page 204 - The Origin of Birds and Flight

202 The Origin of Birds and Flight

Even if dino-bird fossils are not forgeries, there is still significant
evidence that the structures in them depicted as feathers have nothing to
do with real bird feathers—as you’ll see in the pages that follow. The
subject of fabricated fossils also appeared in the British magazine New
Scientist:
Most of the beautiful Chinese fossil birds on sale have been embel-
lished in one way or another. Some may be assembled from broken
pieces of several fossils, while others have had missing features added.
“Almost every one that I’ve seen on the commercial market has some
reconstruction to make it look prettier,” says Kraig Derstler, a palaeon-
tologist at the University of New Orleans in Louisiana.
Many early palaeontologists saw nothing wrong with adding a miss-
ing bone or two. Both the American Museum of Natural History and
the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh acquired fossil skeletons of
Apatosaurus with skulls from different dinosaurs in the 1880s. But the