Nebraska Man

Nebraska Man was a name applied to Hesperopithecus haroldcookii, a putative species of ape. Hesperopithecus meant "ape of the western world," and it was heralded as the first higher primate of North America. Haroldcookii was given as the species name in reference to the original discoverer of the tooth, Harold Cook. It was originally described by Henry Fairfield Osborn in 1922, on the basis of a tooth that rancher and geologist Harold Cook found in Nebraska in 1917. The discovery was made around ten years after the finding of Piltdown Man, another possible human ancestor that turned out to be a hoax. Although Nebraska man was not a deliberate hoax, the original classification proved to be a mistake.