Bob (aka
Cranky Media Guy) sent me a link to an article about
"Scientific Hoaxes" scanned from the Dec. 1931 issue of
Modern Mechanix magazine. I love old popular-science magazines like this. They're a great source of strange information.
Unfortunately whoever scanned this article missed two pages, so you skip from a discussion of the
Central Park Zoo Escape straight into a discussion of the
Cardiff Giant. Nevertheless, the image of a "petrified foot" on the front page caught my curiosity. The caption reads: "A water-worn stone was once offered to the Smithsonian Institute as a petrified foot. Note the striking resemblance."
The article offers no more information about this unusual gift to the Smithsonian. So I did some research in the Google News Archive and was able to find a reference to the petrified foot in a July 18, 1908
Washington Post article titled "Nature as a Faker":
To the Smithsonian Institution not long ago somebody sent from the Bad Lands of Nebraska what purported to be a fossil ham. It did in very truth look like a ham, and, to render the verisimilitude complete, the bone was actually sticking out at one end of it. Nevertheless, an investigation showed that the alleged bone was in reality a "vaculite" -- an extinct mollusk's shell, rodlike in form -- and the rest of the "ham" was a mere accidental agglomeration of stony stuff.
One day, quite recently, a young man walked into the National Museum at Washington and presented to the anthropologist in charge a petrified foot. It was received with many thanks, though recognized at a glance as a water-worn fragment of rock which had accidentally assumed a shape resembling a foot.
Such chance imitations as these frequently occur in nature. Another one, deposited in the same institution, was supposed by the finder to be a petrified oyster. It looks as if on the half shell: all its parts are wonderfully distinct, and there is even a small pearl in it seemingly. Yet it is not an oyster at all.
Nineteenth-century newspapers were full of reports of animals and body parts found petrified in their entirety, perfectly preserved, which reflected a popular misunderstanding about the process of petrifaction. Soft tissue is almost never petrified, because it decays long before the petrifaction process can occur.
Comments
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/~cordoyne/humor.html
There's a well - called the Dripping Well - in Knaresborough, North Yorkshire. The water runs over an wall, then drips down into the pool. If you tie soft objects - like teddy bears, or I suppose a human foot would do - to the bottom of the wall, so the water runs through it, the object eventually turns to stone. it's not cased in stone, it does actually become petrified. They do it to teddy bears, wedding bouquets, all kinds of things.
I have a president, er, I mean, ah, a Teddy Bear, that I'd like to experiment with.
Leadfoot I am not.
I stood too long in the well;
a stone's in my shoe.
http://www.improb.com/airchives/paperair/volume6/v6i6/okamura-6-6.html
Probably the best example of Fossil Pareidolia, although there are many others.