The earliest recorded deliberate paleontological fraud was perpetrated around the year 1725 on a professor , Dr. Johann Beringer, by colleagues and/or students who felt that that pompous professor needed to be brought down a peg. The story goes that those seeking to discredit Beringer salted a mountain side with rocks carved with a variety of figures, both natural and unnatural. The stones were brought to Beringer's attention, and before it was all over Beringer had paid a lot of money to purchase these stones as well as to pay people to find more. He published a treatise on the stones before he realized the hoax.
Legend has it that he finally found his own name carved in one of the rocks. His reputation on the verge of ruin, Beringer vainly attempted to buy back all of the copies of his book, he "ruined himself financially, and shortly died of chagrin and mortification."* [Actually, he died 14 year after publication of the treatise.]
Why didn't he realized these fanciful stones were fake? Beringer explicitly addressed the possibility that the stones were relicts of an earlier culture and the possibility that they were faked. Amazingly, he dismissed these alternatives and concluded that the stones were natural.
Beringer's fatal flaw was that he lost objectivity. He fastened on a favored interpretation-that the stones were authentic--and blinded himself to alternative explanations. The perpetrators probably knew that the vanity of their victim would produce the desired result.
There is a modern post-script to this story--Beringer brought a lawsuit against the perpetrators, and won.
*Reference: The Lying Stone of Dr. JohannBartholomew Adam Beringer. Translated and annotated by M.E. Jahn and d.J. Woolf, 1963.
See also http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/archive/permalink/the_lying_stones_of_dr._beringer/
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