FOSSIL forgers may be about to meet their match. A geology student in the US
has devised a way to spot if different fragments of fossilised bone have been
cobbled together to make a fake.
Infamous fakes include Piltdown Man, a combination of human and ape bones,
and the Archaeoraptor fake exposed last year that was a composite of a
bird body and dinosaur tail
(New Scientist, 29 January 2000, p 12).
But Doreena Patrick of Temple University in Philadelphia has found a way to quickly
expose such forgeries. Her test uses a mass spectrometer to measure the
concentration…
