This past week I played an engaging detective game put on by the Royal Ontario Museum called “Fact or Fiction?”. It’s an annual fundraising event in which the museum carefully selects twenty artifacts from their secret vaults and presents them with a mix of exotic clues, clever lies, and deceptive forgeries.

Each artifact is presented by two of the museum’s curators, each delivering a completely different explanation as to what the object is supposed to be. One curator tells the truth while the other delivers a carefully crafted lie. The guests, taking on the role of detectives for the evening, are invited to question the experts, examine the artifacts, and solve the true identity of the mystery objects before them.

While the event is intended to be one of fascination and excitement, it’s also a challenge that the museum takes very seriously. In the many years that the ROM has been running the game not one single player has managed to solve all twenty artifacts. This year’s winner claimed victory with just sixteen.

The difficulty lies partly in the diversity of objects. Amongst this year’s collection were fossils, textiles, specimens, minerals, preserved animals, preserved plants, ancient tools, antique furniture, and pieces of armor. You might be very knowledgeable about one category, but are unlikely to be an expert in all, which is why the museum’s own faculty has a hard time scoring high when they themselves play.

Another twist is the time limit. The game begins with all the guests gathered in a waiting area before a large gong. When the mallet strikes and the resounding din echoes throughout the hall, the detectives have just ninety minutes to visit each of the twenty tables. They must listen to the curator’s tales, ask them questions, and then mark down their answers before moving on. The mystery begins and the chase is on.

It’s quite a sight to see. Forty museum curators gathered around twenty tables, with twenty artifacts, and then the rush of close to a hundred amateur sleuths swiftly pouncing upon them at the crash of a gong. With the excitement in the air you get a real sense that “the game is afoot”.

The curators themselves are very good at their roles. Identifying obscure artifacts is what they do every day and debating the real stories behind them with their colleagues is an experience they’ve all shared. For them to partner up with another and have a pretend argument involving elaborate details… well, it comes rather naturally.

One of the first tables held a small, glowing box. Inside was a mass of fibrous material, coiled and scrunched into a ball. The threads themselves didn’t produce light, but rather were lit from below by a lamp in the box’s base, effusing them with a magical glow.

Curator B confidently explained that the fibers were taken from a form of Asbestos, Clinochrysolite to be exact. The white threads, once removed from the mineral, have a high tensile strength and can act as an excellent thermal, electric, and acoustic insulator. This particular sample, she explained, came from Asbestos, Quebec, home of the world’s largest Asbestos mine.

“With all due respect to my colleague” countered Curator A, “she is completely wrong”. He explained that what we were looking at, in fact, was DNA. Yes, deoxyribonucleic acid, the genetic code that is found within all living things. While it is true, as most people assume, that you need an electron microscope to see the double helix structure that we all associate with DNA, the actual strands themselves can be seen with the naked eye when properly collected. As astonishing as it may seem, the mass of fibers glowing before us contained all the information needed to produce a specific organism.

Is this asbestos or collected strands of DNA? 

Is it animal or mineral? Would you mark down A or B? I asked Curator A which organism provided the DNA threads and he answered “Herring”. Would that be a Red Herring? Clearly one of the curators was lying, the trick was to come up with a way to tell who.

The gathered detectives were full of strategies. While some hoped that their extensive scientific reading and collection of nature documentaries would help them spot which artifact was which, most of the night’s guests focused on ways to spot the lie in the faces of the tellers. A father and son team told me they were looking for dilated pupils while one of my own Twitter followers suggested that people that lie tend to look down and to the left. Some peppered the curators with questions, looking for inconstancies in their stories. Others simply stared at them intensely, hoping they would crack.

Many tried to look for the psychology behind the game. Were there patterns? Unconscious hints to detect? Was there always one explanation that was just a little too elaborate? Did one story feel a little too simple, too obvious? Who seemed to be working the hardest to try to convince you they were right?The curators, well practiced at this game, would have none of it.

At another table there was a small rock-like formation shaped like a stick with short, blob-like branches.

A petrified lightning strike or..... 

Curator A explained that it was a fulgurite, the result of lightning hitting the sandy, silty ground of a desert. The intense heat of the electricity causes the quartzose sediment in the sand to fuse, creating a tubular, branching sculpture that can be excavated out of the ground. This sample, she explained, came from the Sahara Desert.

Much to the amusement of those gathered, Curator B declared his colleague out of her mind and peddling nonsense. The real explanation he vehemently declared was that we were looking at a fossil, not of a creature itself, but of its home. This was the burrow of a Ghost Shrimp, which it had dug into the sea bed during its lifetime and had lived and fed from. Preserved just like other fossils, this one was 15 million years old and gathered from South Carolina.

...the fossilized burrow of a ghost shrimp? 

One of my fellow detectives asked Curator B if he could repeat the explanation offered by Curator A. The thinking being that while surely both curators would know the truth, only one had gone to the trouble of memorizing the lie. Curator B smiled widely and instantly exchanged badges with the other.

Now wearing the “A” badge he declared the Ghost Shrimp story utter nonsense and launched into an elaborate explanation on petrified lightning strikes and the intense, 1800 degrees C+ heat that is generated to fuse sand into tubular, rock-like structures. His colleague delved deeply into the lives of ancient Ghost Shrimp and the trace fossils they produce. Clearly they had seen this strategy before.

That the lies told by the curators were actually made up of valid information is only one of several twists and tricks used by the museum to keep players on their toes. In some cases, their stories were almost identical.

One of the most exotic artifacts on display was a tiger penis. A petrified coil of tubular flesh ending in a barbed head with two dangling testes the size of prune pits. While everyone in the room knew what a tiger looked like, few could say off hand what its male reproductive organ should appear as, dead or alive.

A tiger penis, possibly a forgery, seized by Canada Customs 

It didn’t matter as in this case both curators agreed that it was a tiger’s penis and both agreed that it had been seized by Canada Customs when someone tried to smuggle it into the country for the lucrative black market in folk medicine. In some cultures, tiger body parts are perceived to have supernatural medicinal properties, the poaching of which has contributed towards placing the tiger on the endangered species list. The demand for tiger penises remains strong and some individuals are willing to pay exorbitant prices to those willing to break the law.

However, according to Curator B, what we were looking at was a carefully crafted forgery, a counterfeit tiger penis sculpted with taxidermist skill out of an apparent mix of cow hide and other animal off-cuts. His colleague, Curator A merely smiled at the suggestion, explaining that, for the people involved in such trade, you don’t need to go that far to produce a fake.

How do you spot a feline Frankenstein forgery? Hold it up to the light and look for stitches or glue? With some of the tests in the game, all you can do is flip a coin.

Adding to the pressure of the game was its prize. In this case those who made a donation to the museum by purchasing a fundraising ticket were competing for an eight day cruise to Halong Bay, Vietnam, for an exotic escape touring temples, wildlife trails, islands, caves, and ancient military tunnels.

Is this an ancient Celtic mask........ 

With such an elaborate adventure hanging in the balance, few were willing to give up so easily and with the clock quickly counting down a time limit, the room became a cacophony of rushed detectives and debating curators. The chase for the truth became consumed by a touch of chaos, just enough that guests could only smile at each other in amusement as they rushed passed to the next table.

Some of the artifacts allowed the detectives to use a little more than their gut instincts and powers of observation. One table held a mysterious box into which detectives were asked to slide their hands inside and feel a strip of leather. It was rough on one side, but oily smooth on the other. Did it belong to an eel or a kid goat? Reaching into the darkness, you could had to make your guess by touch alone.

...or the pelvic bone of a Galapagos tortoise? 

At another table the curators handed out small specimen dishes containing a yellowish fluid for the detectives to smell. It had a powerful, sour scent, similar to vinegar or ammonia. Was it excreted by a Cascade Frog as a defensive measure or by a Whip Scorpion, who might have sprayed it from its tail as an acid that would burn attacking spiders and other anthropods? Did the nose know the answer or would detectives have to go back to their guts for the guess?

One boy playing the game felt so surely that the Cascade Frog was the right answer, he was practically chased across the room by a curator still trying to convince him of his Whip Scorpion story. The passion and frenzy of the curators, who gesticulated wildly, often stabbing the air with their hands and raising their voices, was such that you had to wonder if they were not secretly playing their own game, competing to see who could convince the highest number of guests to select their tale.

Personally I handed in a respectable score of eleven correct answers out of twenty, but the real victory for me was that at two of the tables I actually knew the correct answers with great certainty. Not because I had seen a facial tick or a revealing smile, but because I actually knew the artifact in question.

Is this the vertebra of a Wooly Mammoth or a Killer Whale?

At the first of these tables, I was presented a large bone. It had a central, round peg-like structure with curved bars on either side and a wedge on top. According to Curator B it belonged to a Woolly Mammoth and was excavated from its preserved bed within the permafrost in the Canadian arctic, but as he turned the bone around on the table, changing it from angle to angle, it suddenly clicked in my mind that I had seen this bone before in a number of documentaries, and that it belonged to a whale.

I was delighted when Curator A began to explain that it was the vertebra of a Killer Whale and had been discovered in the strangest of places, buried deep underground at Toronto’s Harbourfront where construction workers had uncovered it while working on the subway system.

I leaped for Curator A’s answer so quickly that he whispered to me that I was only one of a few that night that got it right, that the Wooly Mammoth story was proving too appealing for the others.

My second victory involved a strange mass of noodle-like hairs or tentacles. At first glance it looked like some kind of anemone from the ocean, but sitting dry within an acrylic box that was unlikely.

A bundle of Kiwi feathers or a furry Apieba fruit? 

According to Curator A this was a tassel composed of Kiwi Feathers, harvested from the large, flightless bird that roams New Zealand. The native Maori had wrapped a section of the bird’s hide around a ball of fibres during the late 1800’s and would have used it as part of a ceremonial cloak.Although a strange explanation it seemed reasonable compared to Curator B’s, who insisted emphatically that the odd-looking mass was, in fact, a hairy fruit called Apieba or “Monkey Comb” because of its popularity amongst Spider Monkeys who enjoy the oily package of seeds contained within.

I can’t say I know much about hairy fruit, but having recently taken a tour of the museum’s ornithology department as well as their Schad Gallery of Biodiversity, where they have a perfect specimen of a North Island Brown Kiwi, I knew from memory that a Kiwi’s strange, hair-like feathers are not quite that thick or as long. Oh, the strange facts we pick up.

If you’ve been playing along and want to know the answers to the examples at the beginning of my post, the glowing box of threads is indeed DNA from a herring, the stick-shaped rock is a fossil trace of an ancient ghost shrimp Burrow, the tiger penis is a well-crafted forgery, the smooth leather is from a kid goat, and the vinegar-smelling fluid is the acidic attack of a whip scorpion.

A prize medallion given to medieval knights in jousting matches... or is it a forgery? 

If you’re looking to play this game yourself at the ROM, the good news is that you won’t have to wait until next year. The museum is currently preparing a new travelling exhibition called “Fakes & Forgeries” that will go on display at the ROM in January and then after March will travel across Canada to other institutions in the country during the next four years. The exhibit will explore the history of forgeries and include not only the fossils and artifacts that have tried to fool the curators and experts within museums and the science community, but also the more modern trade in counterfeit goods and digital piracy.

Sponsored by Microsoft and with support from the Bank of Canada, the upcoming exhibit will also focus on pirated copies of movies, Xbox 360 games and computer software, knock-offs of purses, shirts, and sporting goods, and phony currency including bills and coins.

Throughout the upcoming exhibit attendees will be presented with samples of both the genuine and phony goods and asked to spot the fakes.

Are these back aprons for women in the Congo or saddle skirts for donkeys in Mexico? 

It’s a skill that the museum’s experts have been forced to hone and maintain. The reality is that if you are prepared to pay good money for a fossil or an old artifact, then you must also be prepared that someone is going to bring you items that have been tampered with in order to get a high price.

Paul Denis, curator for Fakes & Forgeries: Yesterday and Today, explains “It’s just the experience of handling and looking these things over for twenty-five years. You develop a sixth sense for looking at something. Usually when someone brings in an artifact you can usually tell within the first ten seconds, just by the first impression, that something’s wrong.”