I know it must seem like I get a real kick out of spot­ting other’s taxo­nomic mis­takes and point­ing them out here, but really I’d be a much hap­pier man if it wasn’t neces­sary. All it would take would be for journ­al­ists to double check their terms before going to press, or to make sure they got their pieces proof read by someone famil­iar with the sub­ject. It’s the BBC’s turn again this time, and in the midst of what is, oth­er­wise, an excel­lent piece about recent pion­eer­ing work on determ­in­ing the col­our of dino­saur feath­ers, by using an elec­tron micro­scope to exam­ine the shape and struc­ture of fos­sil­ised melano­somes. There’s noth­ing at all wrong with most of the art­icle. In fact, go and read it now; I’ll wait.

See? It’s all very inter­est­ing; well researched, and well writ­ten, and it avoids the two most grat­ing errors sci­ence pieces in the main­stream media usu­ally make; mak­ing it sound like this has over­turned everything we’ve pre­vi­ously thought about the sub­ject, and giv­ing ‘equal time’ to some wacko who dis­agrees with the research. So, yes, it’s a great piece. With one small error:

A rel­at­ively benign mis­take to make while sat at a desk in a nice com­fort­able office, but there are scen­arios where you might want to be a little more care­ful in check­ing your definitions…

While it’s true that some thero­pods were small, the largest were the largest ter­restrial car­ni­vores ever known to have exis­ted, and included the most fam­ous of all dino­saurs; Tyr­an­no­saurus rex (so you wouldn’t think it would be that hard to check the accur­acy of the statement.)