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Stradivarius could have made the world’s most famous violin, known as the
Messiah. A photo of the £10 million fiddle had suggested the wood from
which the violin was made was growing long after the Italian craftsman had died
in 1737, making it a clever fake. But last week, Henri Grissino-Mayer of the
University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and his team of dendrochronologists told the
Violin Society of America convention that tree rings show the wood was hewn at
least 50 years before Stradivarius died.