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Ever heard of the Piltdown Man? What about Missourium or Archaeoraptor? They're all frauds! Let's learn about them and more this week.\n\nFurther reading:\n\nThe Chimeric Missourium and Hydrarchos\n\nInvestigation of a claim of a late-surviving pterosaur and exposure of a taxidermic hoax: the case of Cornelius Meyer's dragon\n\nMissourium was literally an extra mastodon:\n\n\n\nHydrarchos (left) was a lot more, um, exciting than its fossil donors, six Basilosauruses (right):\n\n \n\nPiltdown man's suspicious skull:\n\n\n\nA lot of people were excited about\xa0Archaeoraptor:\n\n\n\nNot a pterosaur:\n\n\n\nShow transcript:\n\nWelcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I\u2019m your host, Kate Shaw.\n\nLast week we learned about some mistakes paleontologists made while working out what an extinct animal looked like using only a few fossilized bones. Mistakes are a normal part of the scientific method, no matter how silly they seem once we know more about the animal. But this week we\u2019re going to look at some frauds and hoaxes in the paleontology world.\n\nWe really need to start with a man named Albert Koch. He was from Germany but moved to the United States in 1835, and was something of a cut-rate PT Barnum. He called himself Dr. Koch although he hadn\u2019t earned a doctorate. A lot of the so-called curiosities he displayed were fakes.\n\nBack in the mid-19th century, fossils had only recently been recognized as being from animals that lived millions of years before. People were still getting their heads around that concept, and around the idea that animal species could even go extinct. Then the fossils of huge animals started to be discovered\u2014and not just discovered, but displayed in museums where the public could go look at them. Naturally they were big hits.\n\nSometimes these fossil exhibits weren\u2019t free. For example, the mounted fossil skeleton of a mastodon was exhibited by the naturalist Charles Peale starting in 1802\u2014one of the first fossil exhibits open to the public. Peale and his workers had mounted the skeleton to seem even larger than it really was by putting wooden discs between some of the bones. But the exhibit was primarily meant to educate, not just bring in money. It cost 50 cents to see the mastodon and lots of people wanted to. These days Peale\u2019s mastodon is on display in Germany, without the wooden discs.\n\nAlbert Koch knew about Peale\u2019s mastodon, and more to the point he knew how much money Peale had made off his mastodon. Koch wanted one for himself.\n\nIn 1840 he heard about a farmer in Missouri who had dug up some huge bones. Koch bought the bones and assembled them into a mastodon. But Koch wasn\u2019t a paleontologist, he didn\u2019t care about educating the public, and when he looked at those fossils, he just saw dollar signs. And he had ended up with bones from more than one mastodon, so, you know, he used them all. And he added wooden discs between the bones to make the animal bigger. A lot bigger. Between the wooden discs and the extra bones, Koch\u2019s skeleton was twice the size of a real mastodon. Plus, he turned the tusks around so that they pointed upward, either because he didn\u2019t know any better or because he thought that looked more exciting.\n\nHe called his mastodon Missourium and displayed it at his exhibit hall in St. Louis, Missouri later in 1840. It was a hit, and in 1841 he decided he\u2019d make more money if he took Missourium on the road. He packed the massive skeleton up, sold his exhibit hall, and went on tour with just the mastodon.\n\nPaleontologists spoke out against Koch\u2019s Missourium as being unscientific, but that only gave him free publicity. People thronged to his exhibit for the next two years, until 1843 when he sold it to the British Museum. Needless to say, the experts at the British Museum promptly disassembled Missourium so they could study the fossils properly before remounting them into a mastodon that didn\u2019t contain any extra ribs and vertebrae. Also, they put the tusks on the right way up.