Archaeopteryx a Hoax?
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Introduction
Claims that Archaeopteryx is a hoax are common amongst those who wish to deny its evolutionary significance.
Origins: Fred Hoyle
The claims that Archaeopteryx is a fraud originated with British astronomer Fred Hoyle, best known --- or at least, most charitably remembered --- for his work on the synthesis of elements in stars, and in particular his discovery of the Triple Alpha Process.
According to Hoyle the fabricators of Archaeopteryx took the fossil of a Compsognathus, made a paste of limestone and glue, spread it around the arms and tail, and then made impressions in this paste, while still wet, using modern feathers.
Frederick Hoyle blames the palaeontologist Richard Owen for the supposed hoax. Owen was a bitter opponent of Darwinism; Hoyle therefore supposes that Owen had intended the hoax to deceive enthusiastic evolutionists, whose credulity he would then expose: and that then, for some mysterious reason, he changed his mind about revealing the hoax. Most creationists who've borrowed Hoyle's ideas have abandoned this bit of the conspiracy theory, because they don't need it.
We shall review the more obvious evidence against the conspiracy theory.
Compsognathus doesn't look like that
The skeleton of Archaeopteryx has a number of birdlike characteristics absent in Compsognathus, including the reversed hallux and the extension of the arm and forearm to make a functional wing, besides various differences of degree which, though perhaps not so weighty in proving it bird-like, weigh heavily against it being Compsognathus: for example, the reduction of the ventral spines on the vertebrae of the tail. The reader will find twenty birdlike traits of Archaeopteryx listed here; feathers are but one.
No sign of forgery
Paleontologists closely examining the London Archaeopteryx reached a different conclusion from that reached by the astronomer Fred Hoyle working from photographs. The investigators, Charig, Greenway, Milner, Walker, and Whybrow found that a vertical cross-section through the fossil showed no sign of a discontinuity where the supposed limestone paste left off and the real rock began.
They also found positive evidence for the genuineness of the rock. Charig et al write:
Proof of authenticity is provided by exactly matching hairline cracks and dendrites on the feathered areas of the opposing slabs, which show the absence of the artificial cement layer into which modern feathers could have been pressed by a forger. (Charig et al, Archaeopteryx is not a forgery., Science, 1986, v.232, p.622-626.)
Too many specimens
Advocates of the conspiracy theory often talk as though there was only one Archaeopteryx. In fact, there are seven skeletons known, which have turned up over a period of 131 years. The conspiracy, if there was one, would need to be passed down in secret from generation to generation, and would have to include an unlikely assortment of people, including the quarry workers who discovered, and immediately recognised, the Solnhofen Akten-Verein specimen in 1992.
Or how, on the supposition of fraud, are we to explain the history of the Teyler specimen? It was excavated in 1855 (four years before the publication of the Origin of Species) mislabeled as a pterosaur, and then stuck with this mistaken identity for more than a hundred years until a paleontologist took a good look at it. It seems hardly worth the effort of faking an Archaeopteryx unless you try to pass it off as one.
No replication
The obvious step for the conspiracy theorists to take is to attempt to replicate the supposed forgery. They could hardly hope to do so with a Compsognathus --- only two specimens are known, making it considerably rarer than Archaeopteryx. It should not, however, be beyond their means to acquire some small fossil in limestone and see if they can reproduce the fossil feathers of Archaeopteryx.
So far as we know, no-one has tried.
Richard Owen: the unlikely culprit
The fact is that Owen, who was a vain man, and extremely jealous of his reputation, exceeded the British Museum's instructions and his year's budget in order to get the London Archaeopteryx, which he then jealously guarded and worked on so that he should be the first to give a thorough description of the creature, which he did in person before the Royal Society.
It is plain, then, that if the hoax had ever been revealed, Owen would have figured as the Number One Bozo: the man who couldn't recognise a fake when he had it in his hands and under his chisel; and who had squandered, some might say misappropriated, the funds of the British Museum to buy a forgery.
Moreover, Owen went so far as to describe Archaeopteryx to the Royal Society as "a fully-formed bird not dissimilar to several types of modern raptors". This was a pretty bad blunder to make: whether Archaeopteryx is fake or genuine, its host of reptilian features aren't going to go away any time soon. This was a mistake which would come to haunt Owen when Archaeopteryx turned out to have a toothed jaw: Charles Darwin, rather uncharacteristically, gloated "Has God demented Owen, as a punishment for his crimes, that he should overlook such a point?"[1]
Yet Hoyle wishes us to believe that this blunder was deliberate, and that Owen, who had gained his reputation as an expert on dinosaurs, would knowingly stand up in public and mistakenly identify a dinosaur skeleton as a "fully-formed bird" with the intention and expectation of one day being proved completely wrong.
If there had been a hoax of the kind envisaged by Hoyle, and it had been exposed, no-one could possibly have ended up with more Archaeopteryx egg on his face than Richard Owen himself.
