Page 508 - Atlas of Creation Volume 3

Haeckel's fraud under the magnifying glass: Photographs of embryos taken by the
British embryologist Richardson in 1999 showed that Haeckel's drawings were totally
unrelated to reality. Above can be seen Haeckel's fictitious drawings, with authentic pho-
tographs below.

But despite his avowal, Darwinists liked his propaganda material and refused to give up using it. They
ignored the fact that the drawings were false and for decades, textbooks and much evolutionist literature

presented them as authentic.
The fact that Haeckel's drawings were falsifications was loudly expressed only in the second half of the
1990s. The September 5, 1997 edition of the Science magazine published "Haeckel's Embryos: Fraud
Rediscovered," an article by Elizabeth Pennisi explaining that his drawings were fabrications. As she wrote:

The impression they [Haeckel's drawings] give, that the embryos are exactly alike, is wrong, says Michael

Richardson, an embryologist at St. George's Hospital Medical School in London. . . So he and his colleagues did
their own comparative study, reexamining and photographing embryos roughly matched by species and age
with those Haeckel drew. Lo and behold, the embryos "often looked surprisingly different," Richardson re-

ports in the August issue of Anatomy and Embryology. 58
Science reported that, in order to show the similarity among the embryos, Haeckel deliberately removed
some organs from the drawings or added imaginary ones. The article continues:

Not only did Haeckel add or omit features, Richardson and his colleagues report, but he also fudged the scale to
exaggerate similarities among species, even when there were 10-fold differences in size. Haeckel further blurred
differences by neglecting to name the species in most cases, as if one representative was accurate for an entire
group of animals. In reality, Richardson and his colleagues note, even closely related embryos such as those

of fish vary quite a bit in their appearance and developmental pathway. "It looks like it's turning out to be one
of the most famous fakes in biology," Richardson concludes. 59

The article says that somehow, Haeckel's admissions were kept under cover since the beginning of this
century and his drawings continued to be studied in textbooks as if they were authentic. The magazine
says:

Haeckel's confession got lost after his drawings were subsequently used in a 1901 book called Darwin and After

Darwin and reproduced widely in English-language biology texts. 60

506 Atlas of Creation Vol. 3