A science professor who was the victim of a famous hoax. Beringer believed that the Earth was only a few thousand years old and that the biblical account of the Flood was a real event. In the early 18th century, fossils were considered to be creatures made extinct by the Flood or the castoffs of God’s experiments. Beringer became the victim of an elaborate hoax that had been developed to destroy his reputation: His students and two of his colleagues Ignatz Roderich, a mathematician, and Georg von Elkhart, a librarian fashioned strange objects with unlikely animal forms (a bird with a fish’s head, for example) and presented them to him as fossil finds. When he accepted them as genuine, his tormentors produced even more unlikely forms stones with emblems and Hebrew letters, and even the name “Jehovah” engraved on them. In 1726 Beringer published a scholarly book in Fatin, Litho-graphia Wirceburgensis, painstakingly listing, illustrating, and explaining all these finds. Soon after the book was published, he found the most peculiar stone of all one with his own name on it.
An inquiry was held and one of Beringers assistants con¬ fessed. The peculiar stones had been carved by Roderich and Elkhart who persuaded Beringer’s student fossil hunters to bury them in local quarries and then rediscover them. Initially, Beringer refused to believe his colleagues’ confes¬ sion, but when he realized that he had been fooled, he sued the perpetrators. In an effort to save his reputation, Beringer went bankrupt buying up copies of his book and burning them. Nevertheless, some copies survived; the book became a classic of the discovered-hoax genre, with a new edition published in Germany in 1767. In 1963, the University of California Press issued a translation: The Lying Stones of Dr. Johann Bartholomew Jim Beringer.