Did a Pig Make a Monkey out of Scientists?
This is a story that creationists like to tell to show how absurd scientists are. In 1922, a tooth of a prehistoric pig, discovered in Nebraska, was misidentified as the tooth of a prehistoric man. A whole early man, "Nebraska Man," was reconstructed from it before the tooth was correctly identified in 1927. Creationists imply that if scientists can't tell the difference between a pig and a man, how can they be trusted to identify anything correctly?
Actually, the episode highlights two virtues of science: its openness to possibilities and its self-correcting nature. Pig and human pre-molars look similar, so it was a reasonable mistake. It was two teeth, not a single tooth, that were in question. It was not immediately embraced by the whole scientific community as an early man, but was examined as a possible early anthropoid relative. It was not scientists who reconstructed the whole person from the teeth, but a tabloid, the Illustrated London News. Within five years of the release of the teeth to the scientific community, they had been correctly identified and the early anthropoid hypothesis was discarded.
Far from showing scientists as absurd, the episode shows that scientists are open-minded about new hypotheses, have processes for testing them, and discard them if they prove wrong.
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