Dave Hone's Archosaur Musings

A week or two ago a short article appeared in The Times about the red panda. In it, the bold and quite ludicrous statement was made that the red panda is “not related to any other animal”. That would be news to anyone with any background in biology, but this kind of simple, yet gross, error is still commonplace.

I’m sure they simply meant that it had no close living relatives (which itself is debatable, since, well it’s not really in the same bracket of uniqueness as say an aardvark or platypus). However, the implication is that the red panda stands unique with no ancestry at all. While admittedly the use of ‘living’ hints at fossil pandas, it is being marked out as distinct and separate. It’s a fundamental implication of evolution that all species are ultimately, at some level, related and to suggest otherwise is clearly a nonsense.

Now I doubt too many creationists even spotted this, let alone made use of it, but it certainly doesn’t help trying to reach the public and pass on good science. But it’s the kind of error that can easily confuse people who don’t know better. It certainly sounds plausible and authoritative, and that’s just the kind of thing that people tend to accept, or if question, assume that it’s probably correct. It’s also the kind of basic error that’s so wrong, you wonder quite who wrote it, or just how limited their knowledge of biology must be.

OK, it’s not the first or last error of it’s kind and not even the most egregious. But really, it’s still pretty dreadful.

The other night I caught the second half of a documentary about science shows on the TV. It covered a bit of Sci-Fi and drama but mostly the actual science and technology shows and how they were presented, what they covered, how they were made and styled and so on. It was quite light and breezy but did include some classic clips and was a decent summary of the cultural attitude towards science and how it featured on television.

One feature was the use of quite a few talking heads of various researchers who are also well known as TV presenters or similar. One thing absolutely struck me however, so much so that I actually grabbed my camera and took some photos of it (so they are mostly not very good). And here they are. Let’s see if you can spot the ludicriously obvious and annoying trend.

Continue reading ‘The framing of scientists’

On a number of occasions, I’ve documented my fights with the media over press releases ands coverage of my work (as well as plenty of general commentary on the successes and failures of the media). However, despite a few minor issues, the Zhuchengtyrannus media circus has overall been very positive with lots of positive and more importantly, accurate, stories. Much of the credit can go to the UCD press office for their sterling work in reaching a huge number of important people, and of course the taxon itself was always going to be of interest. This is, after all, T. rex Mk II. (Well, III thanks to Tarbosaurus, but you get the idea).

Still, there were things that could have gone better and some that went very well and are worthy of further comment (if only to help fill up another blog post on this thing).

What went right?

We had checked and seen that indeed Cretaceous Research do publish advanced online papers so the minute we got confirmation that the paper was accepted we worked on getting the media package ready (press release, images etc.). Obviously the life reconstruction had been done well in advance and was ready and beautiful which helped push the story. While this was still sprung on us we were ready and able to react quickly.

In previous efforts I had noticed a tendency for places to cut off the artists name from images leaving them uncredited. Here I deliberately placed Bob Nicholls’ name high up on the image that it could not simply be cropped out, but would have to be manipulated, making it more likely it would be kept in and indeed it was.

I could see the tyrannosaur / tyrannosaurine issue being a huge problem, and we actually took the detailed route by using the more specific and technical latter term. I was pleased to note this was reproduced faithfully and accurately in most reports.

What went wrong?

The fact that the embargo for the story ended on the 1^st of April meant we should in hindsight have perhaps put in a note to say this wasn’t a joke. I don’t think anyone did think of it in this way, but we could have cleared up the ambiguity in advance.

Similarly in the past I’ve always made it clear that I’m British working in another country but for once we skipped over that detail and inevitably I was reported as being Irish by a number of outlets.

One problem was new to me and that was having to field several calls from news sources. There’s always a chance you’re going to say the wrong thing no matter how well you know the material or rehearsed you are. In this case what caused problems (as far as I was concerned) is that I didn’t know I was providing quotes! I was asked to explain a few things and then suddenly saw myself quoted in articles. Had I known I was going to be quoted, I’d have thought more about my answers, and made it clear what could and could not be used. Now at least I’m forewarned for next time.

Finally there’s the unfathomable and unaccountable general insertion of utter nonsense, falsehoods and guesswork which accompanies most write-ups. Like birds descending from tyrannosaurs, me having spent three years digging in Shandong, me finding the bones and on and on and on. It was especially annoying that one of the more egregiously awful stories seemed to be the main focus of linking, that is, it seemed to be the one that most people linked to or sourced from which was a frustration of course. None of this you can really do anything about though since it’s done away from you and with no reference to your materials or quotes.

In short, on average things went well. The mistakes we made were relatively small and had only a limited impact on the overall quality of the coverage. Whereas the things we got right had a significant impact – we got a good release out, in as good time as possible and some important details survived intact in the vast majority of cases.