Long ago, relatively speaking, I read a science fiction novel in which a character makes fake fossils as an art installation. Later, this is an important plot point. After reading about the Museum of Jurrasic Technology, I wanted to re-read this novel, but can’t remember the title. It might be a Star Trek novel. What is it?
Terry Pratchett’s Strata is about someone who helps build planets, including the careful placement of artificial bones in the fossil record (so the people who eventually evolve on the planet and dig them up have stuff to make theories about). Some of the employees make fossils holding signs reading “Stop Nuclear Testing!”
You may be thinking of the short story The Artifact Business, by Robert Silverberg, compiled in Arthur C. Clarke’s anthology Time Probe.
This comes up somewhere in the Hitchiker’s Guide too.
Kim Stanley Robinson wrote a short story about an archaeologist discovering all of the evidence about the Vikings landing in North America was fake.
Well, previous to the 1960s, all the physical evidence that the Vikings landed in North America was fake. 
Keep 'em coming–I haven’t read any of these, so the bad news is that I still don’t know what I read, but the good news is that I see a syllabus forming!
Ivory by some guy whose name I can’t remember had something going on in it along those lines.
If there were fake fossils in it, they were fossilized elephant tusks, though.
The planets-builders of Magrathea had been contracted to create Earth as a giant computer program in order to find the question whose answer was “42” etc etc. They had buried fake dinasaur skeletons and whatnot, and were in the process of doing so again on a replacement Earth after the original had been destroyed by the Vogons.
Mike Resnik
My first thought when I saw the thread title was Continued on Next Rock by R. A. Lafferty which lost the 1971 best short story Nebula award to Slow Sculpture by Theodore Sturgeon.
What do I win?
Yeah, that’s what I said 