Paleoanthropology is among the most quarrelsome of fields, so it is no surprise that researchers have gone to war over the remarkable bones discovered in a Liang Bua cave on the Indonesian island of Flores in 2003. But the battle over the Flores find (nicknamed 'The Hobbit' because the type specimen, LB1, is just one meter tall[1,2] ) has an extra element, bizarre even for human paleontology. An influential scientist not connected with the find has carted the bones off from the National Research Center for Archaeology in Jakarta to his own institution, raising fears that researchers, especially the Indonesian and Australian teams that found the artifacts, will no longer be able to study them.