MOST of the beautiful Chinese fossil birds on sale have been embellished 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 palaeontologist at the University of New Orleans in
Louisiana.
Many early palaeontologists saw nothing wrong with adding a missing 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…
