172 FAKE FOSSILS Figure A forged composite group of fossil fishes The fishes here are all exceptionally well preserved, but were not found in this association They are from the famous Santana Formation, Ceara´, Brazil They have been glued together with a mix of car body filler and ground rock embellishment, because the skull represented a new genus and species of dinosaur and represented the most complete skull of a spinosaurid dinosaur ever found Amber Amber has long been famous for its fossil inclusions, and has been used in the jewellery industry with or without fossil inclusions for thousands of years New discoveries of amber in the Dominican Republic have resulted in a large number of forgeries A majority of these are offered to unsuspecting tourists Most are sold cheaply, but a number of higher priced specimens containing lizards and frogs have proved to be cleverly executed forgeries It is not always easy to distinguish forged amber from the real thing The hot needle test, whereby a red-hot needle is pressed into the specimen, will give off a resinous smell if the specimen is genuine amber, whereas the smell will be acrid if it is a synthetic resin; however, the test inevitably marks the specimen Religious Zealots There have been several attempts by those creationists (see Creationism) who appear to feel threatened by palaeontological and geological evidence that runs counter to biblical interpretations that Earth is not terribly old and was created in a very short span of time Rather than accept the findings of science, some supporters of a biblically based creation theory have challenged the data on which certain scientific claims are made by attempting to discredit palaeontology Attempts to this using logical argument have proved difficult, and so some unscrupulous individuals have attempted to undermine scientific findings by forging data Perhaps the most notable attempt was the claim that human footprints occurred alongside those of dinosaurs at the Paluxy River site in Texas, USA The Paluxy River site is famous for lengthy trackways of footprints of Cretaceous dinosaurs and has been made into a National Park Reports that human footprints had been found in the same layers as the dinosaur footprints had always been treated with scepticism by the palaeontological community Wrapped in pseudoscientific jargon, photographs of the human footprints side by side with dinosaur footprints were used as ‘evidence’ that humans and dinosaurs were around at the same time, and it would therefore have followed that dinosaurs could not have been millions of years old Despite considerable protestations by scientists, it was only later that the perpetrators of the forgeries admitted that the human prints were handmade rather than footmade When a Fossil is Not a Forgery One of the most important fossils, historically, is the London specimen of the small feathered bird/dinosaur Archaeopteryx lithographica This fossil was