From the puzzling Tully Monster to the Cardiff Giant hoax and the Magdeburg Unicorn, strange fossil finds have long blurred the line between myth and science. Here’s a look at fossils – real and fake – that occasionally fooled the experts, thrilled the public and helped pave the way for the science of paleontology.
Cardiff Giant: The Famous Fossil Hoax
In 1869, in Cardiff, New York, workers uncovered a 10-foot-tall, 3,000-pound “petrified man” while digging a well behind the barn of William ‘Stub’ Newell.
Newell’s cousin, George Hull, had the giant carved from a gypsum block. To make it look old, Hull wiped it with a sponge soaked in sand and water. He rubbed it with stains and sulphuric acid and beat its surface with steel knitting needles stuck in a board.
The next October, two workers Hull had handpicked to dig a well declared they had “found” a giant. Within 48 hours, Newell was charging fifty cents apiece to see the Cardiff Giant. Nearly 500 people came to see it each day, but not everyone bought into the giant story. Cornell University president Andrew D. White and Yale paleontologist Othniel C. Marsh called it a hoax.
P.T. Barnum (think Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey) offered to buy the giant but ended up building his own copy that he said was the “real” giant.
On December 10, 1869, Hull confessed to the hoax. His “giant” is on display at the Farmers’ Museum in Cooperstown, New York. Barnum’s “giant” is on display at Marvin’s Marvelous Mechanic Museum in Farmington Hills, Michigan.
Wikipedia Commons
Taughannock Man: Another Giant Hoax
In July 1879, in central New York, workmen exposed a seven-foot-tall stone man lying in the ground, with his hands crossed over his right thigh, with tree roots growing around his neck. The man drew thousands of visitors. Scientists were invited to chip off fragments for analysis and later declared it an authentic petrified man from an extinct prehistoric race.
Not so fast, said Frank Creque. He confessed that he and Ira Dean had been asked by the landowner, John Thompson, to go in on a scheme to make their own ‘Cardiff Giant’ to attract more tourism to his hotel. Dean concocted a batter of eggs, iron filings, beef blood, plaster and cement, and molded it into the shape of a giant. With his access as a mechanic to a huge oven, Dean baked the giant until it was rock hard.
Knowing they couldn’t dig a hole and bury an 800-pound ‘fossil’ in recently disturbed earth, they tunneled sideways and pushed the giant in, where an existing tree root gave the impression that it had grown around him. This was convincing evidence that the sod, as experts insisted, “had not been disturbed for a thousand years.”
Even after Taughannock Man was proven a hoax, scientists refused to accept it until Thompson recreated a miniature man using Dean’s special recipe.
Cyclops Fossils: When Myth Meets Bones
In Homer’s tale of The Odyssey, Odysseus and his hungry crew are returning home from the Trojan War when they find food in the cave of the man-eating Cyclops, Polyphemus.
Where did Greek and Roman explorers find proof of a one-eyed race of giants? They found it on the Mediterranean islands of Sicily, Malta and Cyprus. These islands were home until 11,000 years ago, to isolated herds of tiny elephants. As sea levels isolated the islands after the Pleistocene, elephants adapted to shrinking resources by dwarfing, called island rule, to improve their chances of survival.
Some dwarf elephant species were barely three feet tall and weighed under 250 pounds. Greco-Roman explorers would have discovered skulls roughly twice the size of a human’s and, having never seen an elephant, incorrectly interpreted the large nasal cavity in the textbook example of a terrible paleontological center of a skull as an eyeball socket.
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Magdeburg Unicorn: Germany’s Fossil Mystery
There wasn’t much access to paleontology in 16th-century Germany, which is why strange bones can be unicorns. German physicist Otto von Guericke (inventor of the air pump) declared the long legs, head and horn-shaped bones belonged to a unicorn. Did anyone ever put the original bones together? We’re not sure. The model of the Magdeburg Unicorn on display in the town’s Museum of Natural History is of plastic. What we do have is an illustration inspired by the bones, drawn by the inventor of calculus, Gottfried Leibniz.
One theory says the unicorn is composed of the horn of a narwhal, the legs of a mammoth and the head of a prehistoric woolly rhino. The Sewecken Hills, where the bones were found, has a rich Pleistocene fossil record. However, at least for the time being, note German paleontologists, unicorn fossils “remain absent from this list.”
‘Guericke Einhorn’ is the unique creature reconstruction. However, in von Guericke’s defense, his mistake(s) would not have been as obvious in the 17th century as they are today.
Tully Monster: Illinois’ Enigmatic Fossil
Not only is ‘monster’ in its name, but its enigmatic evolution makes it the state fossil of Illinois, and its artwork can be found on U-Haul rental vehicles from the state.
Meet Tullimonstrum, a 300-million-year-old ‘torpedo’ fossil found in 1959 by Francis Tully in the Mazon Creek beds of Illinois. It’s so bizarre that it still defies classification and perplexes paleontologists.
Is this ancient sea creature with eyes like a squid or octopus a vertebrate or an invertebrate? The Tully Monster was lumped in with swimming slugs, sea scorpions and jawless fish. However, Japanese scientists, utilizing high-resolution laser scanner techniques, have analyzed Tully Monster fossils in three dimensions. They are still coming up with more questions than answers, like why its elephant-like nozzle has fangs unlike teeth found on any modern jawless fish.
Tully Monster & Fossil Hoaxes: Final Thoughts
From the Tully Monster of Illinois to the Cardiff Giant of New York and Germany’s Magdeburg Unicorn, fossil finds—real, mistaken, or fabricated—have fascinated the public for centuries. These stories show how fossils can blur the line between science and myth, inspiring both wonder and skepticism.
This story about the Tully Monster and fossil hoaxes previously appeared in Rock & Gem magazine. Click here to subscribe. Story by L.A Berry.
