NEW YORK SHELL CLUB NOTES No. 232 May 1977 Page 7 
SOME PALEONTOLOGICAL HOAXES 
Morris K. Jacobson 
In the May 1977 issue of NATURAL HISTORY magazine there is a fasci- 
nating bit of history entitled PALEONTOLOGICAL HOAXES by Dr. A. 
Myra Keen, the prominent West Coast malacologist and author of SEA 
SHELLS OF TROPICAL WEST AMERICA. The hoaxes dealt with the Piltdown 
man, "discovered" in 1912, Herr Dr. Beringer, the unfortunate German 
scholar who in 1725 was cruelly hoaxed by his students, and the 
Calaveras skull which was foisted upon science in 1886. This arti- 
cle reminded me of two similar but unreported hoaxes in one of which 
I was almost the unwitting perpetrator. 
The first occurred quite a few years ago and concerned a former mem- 
ber of our Club who reported that he had found, as I recall, a small 
mammal skull in a New Jersey fossil bed that was believed to have 
no mammal remains at all. This was an important find and caused 
some excitement in paleontological circles. Unfortunately for the 
perpetrator, the fossil -- as is normal procedure -- was subjected 
to a violet ray examination and this revealed a "fossil" museum ac- 
cession number, written on the specimen but so faded as not to be 
visible to the naked eye. The museum number was traced to a fossil 
collection in a Texas museum and the skull was found to have been 
uncovered in a fossil layer in that State. How the young man ob- 
tained the skull is not entirely clear. Probably he found it in 
some neglected collection of fossils in some college museum. Fortu- 
nately neither the description of the skull nor the report of the 
"find" ever appeared in print. The culprit, who had apparently de- 
liberately fabricated the scheme, had been uncovered before that 
happened. 
The other hoax -- actually only a sub- or pseudo-hoax -- was almost 
perpetrated by me. On a collecting trip to Ward's Point in Staten 
Island, New York, I found a beautifully outlined layer of gray 
clayey mud about eighteen inches below the present soil surface. 
In that layer I found, among other species, large specimens of 
Macoma tenta Say and huge numbers of broken Cyrtopleura costata 
linnaeus. Now neither species, especially the latter, had proved 
to be as abundant in the New York City area as they seemed to be in 
this fossil bed of shells. Thus the quick conclusion was reached 
that this layer represented a fossil bed laid down when our waters 
were warmer and the Cyrtopleura was more common, as common, say, as 
they are today in Florida. I was delighted and returned several 
times to the location, busily digging away and steadily increasing 
my haul of fossil shells. Until one day, right among all the frag- 
ments of the Angel Wing and other species, I came across a beauti- 
fully preserved fossil example of a burned coal cinder! In a moment 
several more of these fossils turned up and my whole "fossil" layer 
disappeared in a flash. 
The "fossil" layer, of course, was nothing more than the remains of 
harbor dredgings performed earlier in the 20th century. I know that 
now, but I did not know that before. Luckily in this case also 
nothing appeared in print about the great find -- except for the 
present confession. So no harm was done. 
In the same issue of NATURAL HISTORY there is also an interesting 
article by Arnold Tamarin called HOW MUSSELS GET ATTACHED. 

