By Richard Conniff
Fakes are surprisingly common in the history of species discovery. For all the painstaking realism of his bird paintings, for instance, James John Audubon was a gleeful producer of cryptozoological oddities, mainly to prank a naturalist colleague named Constantine Rafinesque. I have described Rafinesque elsewhere as “a species monger, too drunk on the elixir of discovery to take much care with his work.” He could base a species description on evidence as slender as a reference in somebody else’s writings. Seeing an opportunity, Audubon sketched up a handful of imaginary fish, including one he said had bullet-proof scales. Rafinesque duly proclaimed a new species he dubbed Litholepis adamantinus—meaning roughly “unbreakable stone scales.”
I first got interested in zoological fakes a few years ago, in the course of writing my book The Species Seekers. So I made a point recently to take in an exhibit called “Monsters and Mermaids: Unraveling Natural History’s Greatest Hoaxes.” It runs through February 11 at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, CT, and it’s mainly the work of the museum’s science curator, Daniel Ksepka, a paleontologist otherwise best known for his research on the evolution of early birds.
The show starts with a fake fishy thing rather different from the one Rafinesque described. Some early nineteenth-century huckster fabricated
strange behaviors 