A find heralded as the greatest discovery in anthropology for a century has degenerated into one of its greatest rows.

Even in a field noted for personal animosity and 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 Indonesia's "king of palaeoanthropology", fails to return the Hobbit fossils which he has taken without permission.

The story hit the front pages in October when a team of Australian and Indonesian palaeoanthropologists announced a sensational find - a new species of miniature human being, standing about 3ft tall, which apparently survived on the remote island of Flores until comparatively recent times.

Supposedly a descendant of Homo erectus, a long-extinct ancestor of modern man, Homo floriensis provided a new twig on the human ancestral tree. There was even the faint hint that somewhere in an Indonesian jungle these tiny people might still flourish.

Almost immediately, modern human emotions began to cloud the picture. Professor Teuku Jacob, the 79 year-old doyen of palaeoanthropology in Indonesia - who had not been involved in the original discovery or its description in Nature - 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 deadly rival for scientific scoops of this quality - by Dr Maciej Henneberg of the University of Adelaide and anthropologist Dr Alan Thorne of the Australian National University.

To add insult to injury, Professor Jacob said that the fossil on which the description of Homo floriensis was based was not female, as the Nature paper had claimed, but male.

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

This week he took the remaining fossils, packing them into a large brown leather case, apparently with the assistance of the co-leader of the team that discovered them, a 76-year-old Professor Radien Soejono.

Professor Jacob is reported to have had no authority to remove the fossils, but signed a paper saying he would return them by January 1.

"It's a tragedy" said one of the discovery team, Dr Peter Brown, to The Australian. "The material should never have left the building. It should have been described by the team that found it."

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