Chonosuke Okamura

Chonosuke Okamura (岡村 長之助, Okamura Chōnosuke) was a Japanese amateur palaeontologist. When he was in his late 70s, he claimed to have discovered fossils from the Silurian period of miniature animals, ranging from dinosaurs to humans, and more than one thousand other extinct "mini-species", each less than 0.25 mm in length.[1][2][3] He claimed that "There have been no changes in the bodies of mankind since the Silurian period... except for a growth in stature from 3.5 mm to 1,700 mm."[3]

In the 1970s he visited Japan's paleontology conference several times and applied to present his findings. It was rumored that in 1978 an elderly paleontologist who walked into Okamura's lecture became so angry that he suffered from high blood pressure and died prematurely.[4] Eventually the paleontology conference changed its rules to ban amateurs and Okamura petitioned overseas colleges, finally publishing his research himself in 1983. He was awarded the Ig Nobel Prize for his work in 1996.[5]