Celebrated as real for decades: Spectacular Alpine fossil turns out to be a fake. It turns out that the fossil is at least partially fake.
With an estimated age of 280 million years, the Tridentinosaurus antiquus was one of the most important discoveries made by paleontologists in the Alps. For years, scientists puzzled over what type of reptile the unusually well-preserved fossil could belong to. The bones behind the paint layer are obviously real fossils, even if some of them are poorly preserved.