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…

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OK, this is get­ting out of hand now. I mean, it was out of hand before, but it just got passed the point where even I can stay quiet about it. It’s like we’ve just passed the event-​​horizon of some new kind of pub­li­city black hole and are now tum­bling help­lessly towards a sin­gu­lar­ity of over­state­ment where, rather than the laws of phys­ics, it’s our sense of pro­por­tion that breaks down.

If you’re not sure what I’m talk­ing about, take a look at this You­Tube clip, and see if you can guess.

Edit: Unfor­tu­nately, You­Tube have removed the video in ques­tion for ‘terms of use viol­a­tion.’ It was a trailer that described a TV pro­gram on the His­tory Chan­nel as the most import­ant event in 47 mil­lion years. It was utterly over the top.

Seen it? Any ideas?

It’s a TV show about a fossil. Ser­i­ously. Gran­ted, it’s a pretty inter­est­ing, par­tic­u­larly com­plete fossil of a 47 mil­lion year-​​old trans­it­ive prim­ate called Ida (who was a mem­ber of a spe­cies we’ve called Dar­winius masil­lae), which is some­thing you don’t exactly see every day. But still: a fossil.

It’s not going to change the world, it’s not going to revolu­tion­ise the way we think about ourselves and it most cer­tainly is not the miss­ing link (which is — as I under­stand it — a term no ser­i­ous palae­on­to­lo­gist would use any­way.) But some­how, the media have got hold of it as some kind of world-​​changing event and are run­ning with it, real­ity be damned. The hype machine has been in full swing for about a week now and, if this video is to be believed, is show­ing no signs of slow­ing down. If it wasn’t quite so depress­ing, it’d be quite amaz­ing how much they can make of so little.

Hat tip to Carl Zim­mer over at The Loom for this and other sens­ible writing about Darwinius.

By now you’ll have all noticed the stor­ies about a newly dis­covered breed of giant sea scor­pion, which ter­ror­ised aquatic envir­on­ments 300 mil­lion years ago. The BBC and CNN have both repor­ted on it. Sloppily.

Quite aside from Kevin Z’s valid cri­ti­cisms of the CNN cov­er­age, the thing both sites have utterly failed to men­tion is that this isn’t that remark­able. I mean, it’s good, inter­est­ing sci­ence, and the team involved have done a great job, but two-​​and-​​a-​​half metre sea scor­pi­ons are not a new dis­cov­ery. In fact it’s only because this recent work has lowered the estim­ated size of a pre­vi­ous find by 40cm that this new dis­cov­ery is con­sidered the largest yet found. I know it makes for bet­ter news if you can make out this is some sort of amaz­ing dis­cov­ery of hitherto unknown giant bugs, but that doesn’t jus­tify neg­lect­ing to men­tion the back­ground to the work.