Archaeoraptor first turned up in a hotel room in Tucson, Arizona. Stephen Czerkas, a dinosaur enthusiast who ran a small private museum, was wandering around a fossil fair when he heard that a Chinese dealer had something extraordinary.

When the dealer unwrapped a foot-long slab of rock, Czerkas experienced a paleontological epiphany. Embedded in the stone were the fossilised bones of an extraordinary prehistoric animal, with the complex limbs of a prototype bird and the distinctive tail of an earth-bound dromaeosaur, edged with the shadow of what seemed to be feathers. It looked like a dinosaur that could fly.

"It was stunning," Czerkas recalls. "I could see right away that it didn't belong on sale. It belonged in a museum."

He hastily contacted a patron who put up the $80,000 the dealer was asking for, and took his prize home in a state of high excitement, convinced he had discovered evidence of a pivotal moment in evolution.

That was last February. In the year since then, the dramatic rise and fall of Czerkas's new bird-dinosaur has been one of the strangest episodes in modern paleontology, and a scandal from which the science is still recovering.

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After months of scrutiny involving x-rays and scans, Czerkas's bird dinosaur was proclaimed a new species, Archaeoraptor liaoningensis , by none other than the prestigious National Geographic journal. The magazine heralded the find as a crucial "missing link", representing conclusive proof that birds were the last living descendants of the dinosaurs.

But weeks later, archaeoraptor was unveiled as a hoax, wedged together with bits and pieces from at least two animals by canny Chinese farmers with a feel for what palaeontologists were looking for. It now appears to have been the dinosaur version of Piltdown Man, the notorious fossil hoax put together in Sussex in 1911 to provide the missing link between man and ape predicted by Charles Darwin.

Archaeoraptor's moment of truth came in December when a Chinese researcher, Xu Xing, visited Liaoning and found evidence that the creature's tail had been stolen from a land-bound dinosaur called a dromaeosaur