Museums' Crystal Skulls Not All They're Cracked Up To Be

Sometimes even the most crystal clear of things can be deceiving, or so a number of museums are learning. It turns out that many of the spookily enchanting crystal skulls, which have been attracting even more interest than usual in the wake of the new Indiana Jones film, are fakes—crafted not by Mesoamerican craftsmen but by, say, a few guys in Mexico City who were handy with a drill, circa 1960. The electron microscopy-assisted findings, some of them reported in a recent paper