Even in a field noted for clashes of personality, the arguments over Homo floriensis — also known as the Hobbit — have become unusually heated.

The row could yet end in the courts, if a top Indonesian scientist, once described as the country’s “king of palaeoanthropology”, fails to return the Hobbit bones that he has taken without permission.

The story broke in October when a team of Australian and Indonesian palaeoanthropologists announced that they had found a new species of human, standing 3ft tall, which apparently had survived on the remote island of Flores until comparatively recent times.

Homo floriensis was supposedly a descendant of Homo erectus, a long-extinct ancester of modern man. There was even the faint hint that somewhere in an Indonesian jungle these tiny people might still flourish.

Teuku Jacob, the 79-year- old doyen of palaeoanthro- pology in Indonesia, promptly declared that the remains were simply those of a modern human with a congenital disease that caused a shrunken brain case.

His stance was backed in Science — Nature’s rival for scientific scoops of this quality — by Dr Maciej Henneberg, of the University of Adelaide, and the anthropologist Dr Alan Thorne, of the Australian National University.

Professor Jacob added that the bone on which the description of Homo floriensis was based was male, not female as the Nature paper had claimed.

Professor Jacob, in an act of anthropological droit de seigneur, had the skull and jaw transported to his own laboratory from the safe-keeping of the Centre for Archaelogy in Jakarta, where it had been deposited by its discoverers.

This week he took the remaining bones, apparently without any authority but with the assistance of the co-leader of the team that discovered them, 76-year-old Radien Soejono. He signed a paper saying that he would return them by January 1.

“It’s a tragedy,” Peter Brown, one of the discovery team, told The Australian newspaper. “The material should never have left the building.”

Professor Jacob said that the finders had already had their chance. “They already have their names on scientific papers,” he said. Justifying his decision to remove the other specimens, he said: “You cannot make conclusions from just one specimen.”

Dr Brown, of the University of New England in Armidale, New South Wales, said that taking the bones violated an agreement signed by his university and Professor Soejono’s archaeology centre. “My interest is that the fossils stay at the repository in Jakarta and that researchers there benefit from it,” he said. “It has to be tested by other scientists.”

Alas for Dr Brown, in palaeo-anthropology finders may no longer be keepers. He has made the discovery of a lifetime, only to have it snatched from him.

Can anything else go wrong? Yes. Dr Brown loathes having his tiny proto-human being called the Hobbit. If anybody uses the word, he puts the phone down. But if anything is certain in this world, it is that the name will stick.

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