In 2008 two scientists from the Shanghai Science Museum and the Zoological Museum in Copenhagen described a new mammalian species, Acinonyx kurteni, from a supposedly 2.2-2.5 million year old skull, as the oldest known fossil cheetah (Christiansen & Mazák 2009). This discovery allegedly also proved an Old World origin for these feline carnivores (Carroll 2008), contrary to earlier beliefs that placed the origin in the New World together with the American cougar. Even before the publication, the Chinese scientists Deng Tao and Qiu Zhanxiang had revealed the skull to be a crude forgery (Stone 2010, Wang 2013) and said that just from photos of the specimen one could easily recognize that parts of the skull had been concocted from plaster. The Read More ›
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