Tim LaHaye is a well known fundamentalist leader. He was one of the founders of the moral majority, co-author of the Left Behind novels, has for decades been involved with creationism, and helped found the Institute for Creation Research. He and David Noebel wrote in Mind Siege (Nashville: Word Publishing, 2000) on pages 141-2:
Two other “proofs” of evolution have since been tossed into the cosmic wastepaper basket: England’s peppered moth and Archaeoraptor. Both have been used for many years to brainwash naive school children with the theory of evolution. Now it turns out that both were fakes.
…
Chinese paleontologist Xu Xing contends that Archaeoraptor, long used by evolutionists as “proof” that birds evolved from dinosaurs, is a combination of two fossils: one of the body and head of a birdlike creature and the other of the tail of a dinosaur. Xing says he has found another fossil, in a private collection in China, that contains the mirror image of the supposed tail of the Archaeoraptor. National Geographic magazine published a note in its March 2000 issue saying that CT scans of the fossil appear to confirm Xing’s observations and “revealed anomalies in the fossil’s reconstruction.” The magazine said details “will be published as soon as the studies are completed.”
Translation: We have been lied to again!
This is simply astounding! It seems that the creationist stories on this get better each time they retell the story. Archaeoraptor liaoningensis was introduced to the world for the very first time on October 15, 1999 press conference at the National Geographic society and was one of the fossils featured in the November 1999 issue of National Geographic. By January of 2000, it was shown to have been a hoax. Contrary to LaHaye’s claim, Archaeoraptor’s public life lasted three months and not “many years.” We can say with 100% certainty that no children heard about this in school before October 1999. And given that great deal of publicity was given to the hoax, it is unlikely that many children were taught anything about this after January 2000. This fossil is not and was not including in any textbooks. Given the huge size of LaHaye’s audience we can expect now that hundreds of thousands of people will now be completely misinformed on this issue. And this shows just how shoddy and nonexistent LaHaye’s research and fact checking are.
National Geographic kept its word and published in its October 2000 issue a five-page article on the hoax that showed in detail how the magazine screwed up. The February 2001 issue published letters about that article. National Geographic was more than honest about the entire affair. This web site’s other articles have documented numerous cases of creationists claiming things that were shown to be false often twenty or more years ago. This is contrasts with National Geographic’s honorable and immediate retraction of the claim once it was shown to be in error.
Of great interest is the February 17, 2000 issue of Nature which covered this affair in far greater detail than any newspaper account. Rex Dalton in a news item called “Feathers fly over Chinese fossil bird’s legality and authenticity” (Nature 403: 689-90) revealed that the scientific paper on Archaeoraptor was rejected by Nature, the journal which published previous finds of feathered dinosaurs, and after that by Science. These are the two top scientific journals in the world. It was National Geographic’s plan to publish concurrent with the scientific publication. By the time NG found out that the paper had failed peer review, it was past press time and it was too late to delay the article. This comes to National Geographic’s worst failure: They were too much in a hurry to publish. If they had waited until the peer review process had ended before preparing to publish themselves they would have spared themselves a whole lot of embarrassment.
One of the reviewing scientists actually suggested that the fossil was doctored. But in short, the Archaeoraptor claims failed peer review and thus never entered the scientific literature. Though National Geographic (which is not a scientific journal) blew it, the process of science did work in this case. It is also very important to note that none of the other fossils that were claimed to be feathered dinosaurs turned out to be frauds; this only affected one fossil. Nor did science simply stop at showing that the fossil was a fraud. The March 29, 2001 issue of Nature has published a scientific paper study on the hoax called “Forensic palaeontology The Archaeoraptor forgery.” (I have not seen that particular article yet.)