known Mesozoic avialan and is now known to have also had teeth, the first specimen with a skull was not described until 1884). Others at the time also recognized the implications of a nearly modern bird with reptilian teeth, and feared the controversy it caused. One Yale student described various men and women urging Marsh to conceal Ichthyornis from the public because it lent too much support to evolutionary theory. Many accused Marsh of having tampered with the fossils or intentionally created a hoax by associating reptilian jaws with the body of a bird, accusations that continued to surface even as late as 1967. However, an overwhelming majority of researchers have demonstrated that Marsh's interpretation of the fossils was correct, and he was fully vindicated by later finds. Mounted specimens At the turn of the 20th century, the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University, where most Ichthyornis specimens were housed, began placing many of its most interesting or important specimens on display in the museum's Great Hall. Two panel mounts (that is, pieces where the skeleton is arranged and set into a plaster slab) were created for Ichthyornis; one for I. dispar, and one for "I. victor". Both were created by Hugh Gibb, who prepared many of Marsh's fossils for study and display. The I. dispar mount contained only the holotype fossils, while the "I. victor" mount was a composite incorporating a variety of different specimens to make the piece appear more complete (it did not, however, contain any part of the actual "I. victor" holotype specimen). At some point before 1937, the catalogue number of the actual "I. victor" type specimen was mistakenly reassigned to the panel mount. Later reports of the specimen, even by the Peabody Museum's staff, therefore mistakenly stated that the original "I. victor" specimen comprised most of the skeleton, when it was in fact only three bones. By 1997, the situation had become so confused that Jacques Gauthier, the current curator of the museum's vertebrate paleontology collection, authorized the dismantling of both panel mounts. This allowed the bones to be properly sorted out and studied in three dimensions, which had been impossible previously when they were embedded in plaster. A full re-description of these specimens was published by paleontologist Julia Clarke in 2004. Classification Ichthyornis is close to the ancestry of modern birds, the Aves, but represents an independent lineage. It was long