"Artificial" made me think of an incident in Jerome K. Jerome's book Three Men in a Boat. An enormous stuffed trout in a glass case catches their attention, and, one after another, five different men--including the landlord--wander through the room and tell the story of how they caught it. Who was telling the truth?

     It really was a most astonishing trout. The more we looked at it, the more we marveled at it.
     It excited George so much that he climbed up on the back of a chair to get a better view of it.
     And then the chair slipped, and George clutched wildly at the trout-case to save himself, and down it came with a crash, George and the chair on top of it.
     "You haven't injured the fish, have you?" I cried in alarm, rushing up.
     "I hope not," said George, rising cautiously and looking about.
     But he had. That trout lay shattered into a thousand fragments - I say a thousand, but they may have only been nine hundred. I did not count them.
     We thought it strange and unaccountable that a stuffed trout should break up into little pieces like that.
     And so it would have been strange and unaccountable, if it had been a stuffed trout, but it was not.
     That trout was plaster-of-Paris.