Hesperopithecus

An image of a hesperopithecus made from the remains of a bipedal man .

Hesperopithecus ( Hesperopithecus haroldcookii ) - a mistakenly described species of anthropoid apes, which journalists dubbed “Nebraska man” - “a man from Nebraska” (the translation also means “Nebraska man”).

The species was described by Henry Osborne in 1922 from a tooth found in Nebraska . Osborne mistook the tooth for monkeys.

In the newspaper Illustrated London News , an image of a Hesperopithecus appeared, which the artist performed based on the remains of a Pithecanthropus ( Homo erectus ). Osborne did not like the drawing, he called the drawing "fiction, not having scientific value, and undoubtedly inaccurate."

In 1925, an identification error was established. Other parts of the skeleton were discovered. It turned out that the tooth did not belong to a primate, but to an extinct species from the peccaria family. A rebuttal of the animal's primacy was published in 1927 in the journal Science . ^[one]

Although the reality of the Hesperopithecus was never recognized by the scientific community ^[2] , and the error was corrected 5 years after the erroneous classification, creationists present this incident as an example of a scientific error that discredits paleontology and the theory of evolution .