Piltdown Meltdown

November 21, 1953 - Today was the day the Natural History Museum of London made the embarrassing announcement that the "Piltdown Man" skull, which for many decades was heralded as evidence of the “missing link,” was actually a relatively clumsy hoax. Turns out that an amateur archaeologist named Charles Dawson perpetrated the fraud by coupling an orangutan jawbone with pieces of a human skull.

Dawson was behind a long list of bogus scientific “discoveries,” including the infamous Brighton “Toad in a Hole,” which was a fossilized toad entombed in a flint nodule.