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Publicity material wrongly claims skeletons to be up to 65 million years old

Property giant Sino Group has made a mammoth error in its promotional and educational material for an exhibition of prehistoric mammals - exaggerating their age by tens of millions of years.

Publicity and educational notes for the company's 'Mega Exhibition of China's Ancient Mammal Fossils', which opened at Olympian City earlier this month, describe the giant fossils as being up to 65 million years old.

A brochure handed out to students taking guided tours  states the exhibits are all 'between around  two million and 65 million years old'.

The English press release for the exhibition, meanwhile, states that all nine exhibits are 65 million years old. The Chinese version of the same release refers to the same age, but also states more vaguely that 'most of [the fossils] have a history of several tens of million years'.

Zhao Yemu, deputy director of Beijing Museum of Natural History, which loaned the fossils  for the  exhibit, said the way the information was presented was misleading. 'They should not be saying that,' Mr Zhao said. 'These fossils are nothing like as old as that. The most recent of them are far less than  two million years old.'

Mr Zhao said the oldest skeleton in the exhibition, a prehistoric hornless rhino and the largest-ever mammal, paraceratherium tienshansis, walked the Earth  about 40 million years ago. The second-oldest exhibit was half that age and three others fell between 10 and 20 million years old.

But the remaining four skeletons are well under 500,000 years old, including a straight-toothed elephant from  about 100,000 years ago and a woolly mammoth that is about twice that age.

A spokeswoman for Olympian City management said the promotional material had been produced by an outside company, which was supposed to have been liaising with the museum.

'If the information is inaccurate, then we will need to take action to rectify this. We are trying to verify all the information from official sources,' she said.

The website is at: http://www.sino-land.com/eng/default.asp?xid=media_press_detail&name=00…



Mammoth error at fossils exhibition