Researchers uncover forgery of a reptile fossil found 100 years ago in the Italian Alps.
The reptile fossil, estimated to be 280 million years old, won the researchers an award.
The fossil, which belongs to a reptile thought to have lived before the first dinosaurs, has real legs and scales, but the rest of the fossil was created by painting the rock.
Scientists thought that the reptile fossil still had some soft tissues inside its black body, and this rare condition caused great surprise.
The study, published in the scientific journal Palaeontology and reported in Independent Turkish, revealed that the black parts of the fossil are paint. Valentina Rossi of Cork College University, who led the study, said the fossil had not been carefully examined with modern techniques until now.
“The fossil is unique. This brought some difficulties in analyzing it. We couldn’t afford to damage the fossil by making any mistakes while analyzing it. Incredible technological advances made this study possible. This is how we were able to analyze the fossil at the molecular level.”
“All of the black material is fake skin,” the Irish paleontologist said of the black areas previously thought to be soft tissue.
The 280 million-year-old fossil was found in 1931 by Italian engineer and museum worker Gualtiero Adami. A year later, geologist Giorgio del Piaz, who examined the fossil, announced the discovery of a new species called Tridentinosaurus antiquus. At the time, the reptile’s black skeleton was thought to be carbonized skin or flesh.
One of the reasons why the discovery came as a surprise was that all the fossils found in the Italian Alps from the same period were in the form of bones or footprints. The oldest other fossils of animal skins and flesh in the region dated back 180 million years.