Avialan Theropod / Paraves Specimen?

[Archeognathus1988]

Hello everybody,

I was just scrolling through an auction site and stumbled across this specimen.

 

It's price is way out of reach, but it caught my attention.

Obviously it is no Archeopteryx as the seller claims. Not much info about it's origins.

Middle Jurassic, China taken with a pinch of salt...

 

To me the bones seem pretty decent and real but some things are (perhaps) a bit off. For some kind of Paraves the arms seem to be pretty small / short and the skull looks kind of...unnatural?

 

Perhaps a composite or even fabricated parts? There are many more pictures, but I did not want to upload them all.

 

IF this should be a completely genuine specimen imho it should be in a museum's collection and being studied!

Proportions could point out to some kind of Troodontid.

 

At first glimpse I was fascinated but the more I look into detail the more I think it could be not what it seems to be.

Too good to be true so to say.

 

What do you think? Could it be real and if, what kind of theropod do you think we see here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[GracieMac]

I have no idea! However, I am very interested to learn how it could be fabricated. I am new to the fossil world and genuinely want to learn all I can. Not that I could afford anything like this but I certainly would want to be able to tell a real from a fake if/when I do decide to purchase a fossil. 

[jpc]

5 hours ago, GracieMac said:

I have no idea! However, I am very interested to learn how it could be fabricated. I am new to the fossil world and genuinely want to learn all I can. Not that I could afford anything like this but I certainly would want to be able to tell a real from a fake if/when I do decide to purchase a fossil. 

Somewhere in this forum there is a subforum on how to tell if it is a fake.  It is a good thing to read if you are new to buying fossils.  

 

This fossil looks pretty good from here, but there are more seasoned fake-detectors on the forum; I would like to hear what they might think.  

[TriVeratops]

The proportions seem to match up reasonably well with anchiornis. There are some weird cracks following the outline of the skull that look to me like shrinkage of some kind of putty, which might indicate a composite or a complete fake.

 

Apparently anchiornis is known from hundreds of specimens (per wikipedia, didn’t bother to look up original source, sorry) so it’s not totally inconceivable that some part(s) could be real, but I wouldn’t bet on it. 

[Randyw]

When I blow up the pictures I’m not seeing any obvious red flags. The cracks in the matrix line up, the joints in the limbs match, proportions are simetrical, not seeing any signs of bubbles etc but the pictures blurr when I go to the highest zoom so there maybe something I’m missing.

10 hours ago, GracieMac said:

am very interested to learn how it could be fabricated

There are thousands of fakes out there of most any kind of fossil. Some are carved, some are casts, some are painted, some are composited. They range everywhere from excellent fakes to the laughable what were they thinking fakes. There’s a few topics on the forum here that describe and give hints on how to spot fakes. Use the search bar and it will take you to them

[rocket]

my opinion: a good one. Might be it has some tiny restorations at some bones, but was a badly broken slab. So, the restoration is really really well done and minor

[Archeognathus1988]

16 hours ago, TriVeratops said:

The proportions seem to match up reasonably well with anchiornis. There are some weird cracks following the outline of the skull that look to me like shrinkage of some kind of putty, which might indicate a composite or a complete fake.

 

Don't know. I'd still say that the arms seem to be way too short. In skeletal reconstructions the arms of Anchiornis and most other paraves are about 80-90% of the length of the legs. Could not find the paper with the exact ratio.

I agree that there seems to be something done at least to the upper part of the skull