Alas! It is 288 years since the world was deprived of fossil hunter Johann Beringer. The only problem with his work was that, being a busy doctor, he employed others to dig for him. And they faked the lot 🧵

April 11, 2026 - 12:33 UTC

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To be fair, those do look delicious
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At least the forgers were creative.
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How do we know they aren't Stone Age art? 😀
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The year after the geology field trip I went on to Arran, a lad from Durham University scribbled a fossil (a graptolite which looks a lot like a pencil scribble at the best of times) on a rock with a pencil and was taken seriously enough by his supervisors that the fallout made Private Eye
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Excellent!
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My favorite early fossil history: in the 17th century, one explanation for marine life fossils high on mountains was that the "life force" somehow got into the stone and was able to grow for a while.
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Johann Bartholomew Adam Beringer was a prominent German physician, and “Like other learned men of the time ... kept a ‘cabinet of curiosities’ said to contain ammonites, belemnites and sharks’ teeth”
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Wanting more, but not having the time to go round digging them up himself, Beringer – according to Jon M Mallatt in The Annals of Science in 1982 – “hired three boys to search the hills around his native Würzburg for unusual stones”
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