For various reasons, paleontology is buried underground, and when all the organic matter is decomposed, only inorganic matter remains to maintain some of the characteristics of the organism. Based on these characteristics, human beings can restore the condition of organisms before their deaths, and then study the various stages of the evolution of life on the earth and infer the evolution process of life on earth.
For this reason, fossil samples that have a transitional period in the process of evolution are particularly important, because they record the continuity of the species during the evolutionary process. However, because it is a transitional period, the time of existence is relatively short, so this deterioration stone is very rare.
Such a fossil has been found in the West, which is a key sample in the evolution of reptiles, and it has been nearly 100 years since it was excavated in 1931. This "rare fossil" has been continuously studied and countless papers have been published.
But in February of this year, through the recent detection of scientific instruments, it was found that this fossil is a fake artificially fake, I wonder what kind of mood the scientists who have tried their best to study it?
Discover new species 280 million years ago
In 1931, Gualtiero Adami, an Italian engineer who was also a museum salt worker, discovered a fossil near a village in Basel-Gadipinet.
The fossil contains a black lizard-like fossil, about 20 centimeters long, with an elongated body and five fingers clearly visible at the ends of the limbs.
Adami was a museum employee with a dedication that he did not take it for himself, but when he found it, he gifted the fossil sample to the local museum.
Such a clear sample of a fossil is rare, and after the fossil was sent to the local museum, it caught the attention of paleontologists, who had never seen such a species before.
Based on the stratigraphy of the samples found, it is inferred that this species is about 280 million years old, and this period is the transition period from reptiles to dinosaurs.
And the creature in this fossil sample not only has the characteristics of reptiles, but also has some of the characteristics of early dinosaurs, so the identity of the creature in this fossil is clear, it is a species between reptiles and dinosaurs.
But biologists at the time still classified it as a dinosaur, and this fossil was different from any fossil found, so they re-established a genus for it, which was Triodontosaurus. It's like having a single family tree.
The battle over the ownership of the three-toothed dragon
Paleontologists have long debated the attribution of the tricodontosaur, and although the outline of the tricodontosaur in this fossil is clearly visible, there is a lack of key evidence.
This is because the fossils lack key evidence such as skulls, hind limb bones, and tibia, and most of the paleovertebrates are relatively clear when they are found, so they are relatively easy to identify.
In addition, this fossil is also different from other vertebrate fossils, that is, the soft tissue of the tricottosaur has been completely preserved through carbonization, and its color is darker than that of ordinary fossils, which is extremely rare in fossils, and highlights the preciousness of this fossil.
The question of the attribution of the three-toothed dragon has actually been debated in the paleontological community for nearly a hundred years, because such a sample was found, even if no similar sample was found, the species seemed to appear out of thin air and disappeared out of thin air. Some biologists believe that it is not appropriate to have a separate "genus" for it.
Therefore, it was wanted to classify tricottosaurs among the dinosaur species discovered at that time, and some biologists thought that it should be classified in the order Slim-legged dinosaurs, because this group had some resemblance to reptiles. Although the three-toothed dragon is different, it conforms to the characteristics of reptiles.
In 1997, biologists put forward a suggestion that it is not right to classify Triodontosaurus in the order of Slender Loposaurus, because it is very different from reptiles, so it is classified in the original Logosaurus according to its outline.
In the past 100 years, the research on the three-toothed dragon has not been broken, and the dispute over the ownership of the three-toothed dragon has never been broken.
If you want to find out the true ownership of the three-toothed dragon, then you have to break through the carbonized cartilage layer and directly see the internal structure of the fossil, but for such a precious fossil, it is obviously impossible to study it in such a destructive way.
In this way, biologists continue to study the tricodontosaur, and papers on the problem of the tricodontosaur are constantly published, and if this continues, then the tricodontosaur can continue to be studied for 100 years.
The emergence of new technologies has unraveled the mystery of the Triodontosaurus
Without the advent of new technology, it is obviously unlikely that the question of the ownership of the Triodontosaurus will be determined without destroying it.
However, with the continuous progress of science and technology and the birth of some scientific instruments, paleontologists only need a trace amount of fossil materials to figure out the basic situation of fossils through molecular level analysis, and then infer the evolution process of fossils.
In order to find out the identity of the tricodontosaur, the University of Padua in Italy, the Alta Adige Museum of Natural History, the Science Museum in Trento and the University of Cork in Ireland joined forces to determine the attribution of the tricodontosaur with the most advanced technology.
First of all, when scanning, this three-toothed dragon fossil made scientists very confused, the general organic matter was preserved, under the continuous pressure of hundreds of millions of years, generally only a thin carbonaceous film remained, but according to the scanning results, it was not like this, but uneven, and thick in some places, thin in some places.
This shows that there are traces of human processing in the fossil samples of the tricodontosaur, and if it is only a simple modification, then scientists can still accept it if the outline of the tricodontosaur has not changed significantly.
Next, they continued the next research with apprehension, but the next discovery made the scientists completely break the defense.
Under the observation of scientific instruments, the carbonized soft tissues of the three-toothed dragon showed yellow fluorescence under ultraviolet rays, while the carbonized tissues of the same period did not have such characteristics at all, and generally did not emit light.
Only modern synthetic pigments, such as paints or colloids, emit such light under ultraviolet light, so it is certain that the so-called three-toothed dragon fossils are nothing more than coatings covered with pigments.
Then, using molecular analysis techniques, bone carbon was found in the sample, which is also a type of pigment, that is, the animal bones are calcined at high temperatures to remove the organic matter in the middle, and this pigment is also called bone black.
Therefore, it is proved that the Triodontosaurus fossil is a complete artificial fake, painted with paint. And scientists have painstakingly studied this for nearly a hundred years and published countless papers, which turned out to be a joke.
Now that Gualtiero Adami is long gone, we have no way of knowing what he was trying to fake at the time, maybe out of boredom, maybe it was fame, maybe it was just a prank, who knows? But he undoubtedly deceived scientists for nearly a hundred years.