ETERNITY

[MSC290]

The tooth and nothing but the tooth

Assume you probably agree with the excerpt from the following post on this board:

#msg-37976404

"have you ever seen the suposed missing link called Lucy? Well they never found a body. They found a tooth. Yes a tooth and built a whole model out of this tooth and when real scientist researched it they found out it was a dang PIG'S TOOTH lololol"

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Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis) - 3.2 million years old - Discovered November 24, 1974 by Dr. Donald Johanson

Over the three weeks, several hundred pieces or fragments of bone were found, with no duplication, confirming their original speculation that they were from the one skeleton. As the team analyzed the fossil further, they calculated that an amazing 40% of a hominin skeleton had been recovered, an astounding accomplishment in the world of anthropology.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_%28Australopithecus%29

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Perhaps the poster referenced was thinking about the following tooth article and became confused.

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Nebraska Man

Nebraska Man was the name applied by the popular press to Hesperopithecus haroldcookii, a putative species of ape. Hesperopithecus meant "ape of the western world" and it was heralded as the first higher primate of North America. Though not a deliberate hoax, the classification proved to be a mistake.

It was originally described by Henry Fairfield Osborn in 1922 on the basis of a tooth found in Nebraska by rancher and geologist Harold Cook in 1917. An illustration of H. haroldcookii was done by artist Amedee Forestier, who modelled the drawing on the proportions of "Pithecanthropus" (now Homo erectus), the "Java ape-man", for the Illustrated London News. Osborn was not impressed with the illustration, calling it: "a figment of the imagination of no scientific value, and undoubtedly inaccurate".

Further field work on the site in 1925 revealed that the tooth was falsely identified. Other parts of the skeleton were also found. According to these newly discovered pieces, the tooth belonged neither to a man nor to an ape, but to a fossil of the extinct genus of Peccary called Prosthennops and its identification as an ape was retracted in the journal Science in 1927.

Although the identity of H. haroldcookii did not achieve general acceptance in the scientific community, and although the species was retracted a decade after its discovery, creationists have promoted this episode as an example of the scientific errors that they allege undermine the credibility of how palaeontology and hominid evolution theories are crafted, and how information is peer reviewed or accepted as mainstream knowledge. However, such mistakes are not the norm in paleontology or historical science in general.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebraska_Man