NEBRASKA MAN

                                   

The June 24, 1922 Illustrated London News presented on its front cover a man and a woman who had been reconstructed from a single tooth found in the state of Nebraska.

The artist even incorporated clothing and imaginary surroundings into the drawings of this alleged “missing link.” When Henry Fairfield Osborn, head of the department of vertebrate paleontology at New York’s American Museum of Natural History, received the fossil tooth in February of that year, he would have thought it a gift from the gods—had he believed in any god at all.

 Marxist in his views, and a prominent member in good standing of the American Civil Liberties Union, he was aware that plans were being made by the ACLU to challenge legislation that would forbid the teaching of evolution in American schools.

 He saw in the tooth precious evidence for the test case, which eventually was held in 1925 at Dayton, Tennessee (the famous Scopes “Monkey Trial”). The trial, as it turns out, was an arranged affair, but the tooth was not brought in as evidence because dissension occurred among those who knew of its existence.

The truth leaked out slowly and obscurely at first, but eventually was thrust into the public eye in the January 6, 1923 issue of the American Museum Novitiates, where nine authorities cited numerous objections to the claim that the tooth was even distantly related to the primate.

 A further search was made at Snake Creek (the site of the original discovery), and by 1927 it was concluded (albeit begrudgingly) that the tooth was that of a species of Prosthennops, an extinct genus related to the modern peccary (a wild pig).

These facts were not considered generally newsworthy, but did appear in Science (see Gregory, 1927, 66:579). The fourteenth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1929, 14:767) coyly admitted that a mistake had been made and that the tooth belonged to a “being of another order.”

Creationist Duane Gish observed: “This is a case in which a scientist made a man out of a pig, and the pig made a monkey out of the scientist” (1995, p.