On February 3, 2000, National Geographic issued a press release stating that the fossil could be a composite and that an internal investigation had begun. In that same month Bill Allen, National Geographic editor, told Nature that he was "furious" to learn that the fossil might have been faked. In the March issue, in the forum section, a letter from Dr. Xu Xing pointed out that the tail section probably did not match the upper body. In October 2000 National Geographic published the results of their investigation, in an article written by Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Lewis M. Simons. Simons concluded that the fossil was a composite and that virtually everyone involved in the project had made some mistakes.
