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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Oh, oh, oh! This is an excit­ing one! Earlier this year, when the dis­cov­ery that Komodo Dragons (Varanus komod­oen­sis) are venom­ous was pub­lished, I idly wondered if any dino­saurs were as well. Komodo Dragons and dino­saurs are not closely related, so there was no reason to make that leap, bey­ond the fact that they are (or, in the case of dino­saurs, were) both large ter­restrial rep­tiles, and that I want it to be true.

Well, it turns out I might yet be onto a win­ner with that one. A recent pub­lic­a­tion by Enpu Gong of the Chinese Academy of Sci­ences doc­u­ments fossil evid­ence that Sinor­ni­tho­saurus, a small Creta­ceous thero­pod from what is now China, pos­sessed a venom­ous bite. The venom gland itself, being soft tis­sue, has not been pre­served¹, but the skull con­tains a cav­ity that Gong believes could have con­tained one. More con­vin­cingly, the animal had long, grooved upper teeth, like those used by extant rear-​​fanged snakes to inject venom into prey, with voids above them, which could have func­tioned as local reservoirs.

Not everybody’s con­vinced, and I’d cat­egor­ise the evid­ence as ‘strongly sug­gest­ive’ rather than a slam-​​dunk, but it’s fas­cin­at­ing stuff and lends a big pile of cred­ib­il­ity to an idea that I really want to be true.

Check out Ed Young’s longer and bet­ter cov­er­age, over at Not Exactly Rocket Sci­ence.

1. Which is not to say that soft tis­sue can never leave fossil evid­ence, in fact Sinor­ni­tho­saurus is also fam­ous for being one of the first dino­saurs to be dis­covered with fos­sil­ised feather-​​impressions, merely that it is sig­ni­fic­antly rarer. [↩]