Re: Newspapers & **Dinosaurs** (posted for D. Campbell)

[N.MacLeod@xxxxxxxxx (N. MacLeod)]

Mime-Version: 1.0
Date: Fri, 25 Aug 1995 15:05:38 -0500
To: paleonet-owner@nhm.ac.uk
From: bivalve@email.unc.edu (David Campbell)
Subject: Re: Newspapers & **Dinosaurs**
Status: O

Even the fundamentalists don't believe Ussher's guess on a date, so that's
not a likely factor.  More likely, it's the pervasive journalistic
ignorance of science.  Although the examples from the general press are
more frequently grossly erroneous, I've seen pterosaurs called dinosaurs in
Scientific American, and general geology textbooks generally contain major
errors in their paleontology.
A couple of impressive ones from the press lately include an Associated
Press story about a lot of Paleozoic limestone exposed by the big floods on
the Mississippi River a few years back.  They consistenly referred to
"archeologists" when they should have said "paleontologists" and contained
such bits of information such as that sea lillies are "plants or animals or
something in between.  It depends on what archaeologist you talk to.",
brachiopods are ancient clams, etc.  This story was carried in many papers
across the U.S. and also made the TV news.
Locally, we dug a skeleton up in a Triassic basin, and word unfortunately
got around in the press.  The Spartanburg, S.C. paper intended to run a
photo of my advisor and a couple of students digging it up.  They also had
a picture of the head of a carnosaur as an ad for the Paleoworld T.V. show.
Someone put the two together, not bothering to read the whole caption, so
that what was actually published was the picture of the carnosaur, with the
caption: "FOSSIL DISCOVERY: From left, Joe Carter, Brian Coffey, and Todd
Pusey..."  Even if they couldn't figure out that these aren't the names of
dinosaurs, they ought to be able to count to three and figure something's
wrong.  Not that that paper seems to have anyone editing most of it
anyway...


David Campbell   "old seashells"
Department of Geology
CB 3315 Mitchell Hall
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Chapel Hill NC 27599-3315
bivalve@email.unc.edu