For 116 years it graced the halls of the National Museum of Wales at Cardiff - the fossilised skeleton of a 200m-year-old predator that once cruised the Jurassic seas. It survived the scrutiny of scientists who had known Charles Darwin, and Richard Owen, the Victorian scholar who coined the word dinosaur. It survived revolutions in palaeontology, arguments over evolution and scandals in the world of fossils.
Then curators at Cardiff decided the remains of the ocean-going carnivore ichthyosaurus needed a brush up - and realised that they had been taken in.
"When we stripped off five layers of paint we found it was an elaborate forgery," said Caroline Buttler, a conservator. "It was an amalgam of two types of ichthyosaurus plus a clever attempt at fake parts."
Ichthyosaurs were discovered by fossil collector Mary Anning on the Dorset coast in about 1809. Cardiff's specimen was presented by a local businessman, Samuel Allen, in 1884.
It will now go back on display as an example of a fake. Museum officials have dubbed it "iffyosaurus".
