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.