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Aware that he was in the possession of a fossil of great significance, Collyer brought the jaw to the curator of the Royal College of Surgeons, who suggested that he show it to Richard Owen. Collyer delivered the jaw to Owen, who kept it for two years without giving a report. In 1859, Collyer retrieved the jaw, and then took it, in turn, to Sir John Prestwich and Thomas Henry Huxley.

In April of 1863, Collyer displayed the fossil jaw at a meeting of the Ethnological Society of London, at which the prominent geologists Charles Lyell and Roderick Murchison were present. George Busk, a paleontologist, said at the meeting that the fossil bone from Foxhall was “the jaw of some old woman, perhaps from some Roman burial ground,” but he later withdrew this skeptical statement (Osborn 1921, p. 567).

Huxley, who was also present at the meeting, visited Collyer the next morning to further examine the jaw. At that time, Huxley said that it was “most extraordinary,” but in May of 1863 he wrote that the morphology of the bone did not indicate it belonged “to an extinct or aberrant race of mankind,” adding that “the condition of the bone is not such as I should expect a crag fossil to be” (Osborn 1921, p. 568).

Figure 6.2. Human jaw discovered in 1855 in the Late Pliocene Red Crag formation at Foxhall, England (Osborn 1921, p. 568).

The jaw then passed into the hands of Hugh Falconer and eventually wound up in the possession of George Busk, who showed it to de Quatrefages and other French scientists. In July of 1863, Busk stated the jaw was of “very great antiquity” (Osborn 1921, p. 568) but not necessarily from the coprolite bed at Foxhall.

American paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn, writing in the 1920s about Moir’s finds of flint tools in the same area where the Foxhall jaw was uncovered, wondered why the above-mentioned scientists did not take the trouble to visit the site. They disbelieved, said Osborn (1921, p. 568), “probably because the shape of the jaw was not primitive and the degree of mineralization was not such as positively to prove it a fossil. He [Collyer] had a chemical analysis made that showed that the jaw was largely mineralized, but retained 8 per cent of animal matter.” But Moir reported that chemical analysis of bones from the Red Crag demonstrated that many of them had up to 6.5 percent animal matter (Osborn 1921, p. 568).

After some time, the jaw mysteriously disappeared, as did Collyer himself. All that is now known of Collyer is that he was a graduate of the Berkshire School of Medicine, once located at Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and that he was a friend of Dr. Morton, who was a craniologist and member of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. All that remains of the jaw is a detailed drawing made in 1867 by Collyer and the scant published record of the controversy surrounding it (Osborn 1921, p. 569).

The fossil jaw from the Red Crag at Foxhall is almost never mentioned by modern authorities, and those who do mention it are invariably scornful. For example, we find in Fossil Men, by Boule and Vallois (1957, p. 107), this statement: “It requires a total lack of critical sense to pay any heed to such a piece of evidence as this.”

But, as we have often pointed out, many conventionally accepted bones and artifacts have been found by uneducated workers or in other dubious ways. For example, most of the Homo erectus finds from Java were made by unsupervised, paid native collectors (Section 7.3). And the Heidelberg Homo erectus jaw was found by German workmen, whose foreman later turned it over to scientists (Section 7.2).

If scientists can seriously consider these discoveries, then why can they not seriously consider the Foxhall jaw as well? One might object that the Java Homo erectus fossils and the Heidelberg Homo erectus jaw are still available for inspection, while the Foxhall jaw has vanished. But the original Peking Homo erectus fossils disappeared from China during World War II (Section 9.1.12); yet they are still accepted