Compression fossil

Differences between the impressions on slab and counterslab led astronomer Fred Hoyle and applied physicist Lee Spetner in 1985 to declare that some Archaeopteryx fossils had been forged, a claim dismissed by most palaeontologists.

[7] In its November 1999 edition, National Geographic magazine announced the discovery of Archaeoraptor, a link between dinosaurs and birds, from a 125 million-year-old fossil that had come from Liaoning Province of China.

In October 2000, he reported what he termed: a tale of misguided secrecy and misplaced confidence, of rampant egos clashing, self-aggrandizement, wishful thinking, naïve assumptions, human error, stubbornness, manipulation, backbiting, lying, corruption, and, most of all, abysmal communication.It was eventually determined that Archaeoraptor had been constructed from parts of an Early Cretaceous bird Yanornis martini and a small dinosaur Microraptor zhaoianus.

A reptile fossil also found in Liaoning was described and named Sinohydrosaurus in 1999 by the Beijing Natural History Museum.

In the same year the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing described and named Hyphalosaurus lingyuanensis, unaware they were working with the counter slab of the same specimen.