26 September 2023

Humans walking with dinosaurs


Stuff like this drive me crazy.  I found the illustration at an otherwise sensible SciTechDaily, accompanying an article entitled "Shocking Study: Humans’ Ancestors Lived Among Dinosaurs and Survived Asteroid Strike."

Which is trueHuman ancestors did coexist with dinosaurs - but the "ancestors" referred to are the first placental mammals, not bipedal simians.
Fossils of placental mammals are only found in rocks younger than 66 million years old, which is when the asteroid hit Earth, suggesting that the group evolved after the mass extinction. However, molecular data has long suggested an older age for placental mammals... In a new paper published in the journal Current Biology, a team of palaeobiologists from the University of Bristol and the University of Fribourg used statistical analysis of the fossil record to determine that placental mammals originated before the mass extinction, meaning they co-existed with dinosaurs for a short time. However, it was only after the asteroid impact that modern lineages of placental mammals began to evolve, suggesting that they were better able to diversify once the dinosaurs were gone.
I can understand that whoever curates content for SciTechDaily was faced with a Current Biology article containing illustrations like this -


- and opted instead to find some appropriate "eye candy" by searching for an illustration using the keywords "dinosaur" and "human ancestor."  That illustration is visually misleading and will offer support to those who believe humans walked with dinosaurs.

And while I'm ranting from my high horse, let me add this one I found today:


OMG - if things continue as they are going now, our planet will be "uninhabitable" in 250,000,000 years!  If you think your oceanfront lot is having problems now, just wait until the continents merge!!  C'mon Guardian.  You're better than this.

2 comments:

  1. Human ancestors did coexist with dinosaurs - but the "ancestors" referred to are the first placental mammals, not bipedal simians.

    Another example of the slight-of-hand with language that science deniers constantly engage in. They do it to obfuscate, because they know that the skirt through the holes in language, and because explaining that subtlety requires two hours in explanation.

    They do this when they ask if you "believe" in climate change, conflating the two meanings of the word "believe": inherently feeling v being convinced, thereby equating scientific data to a religious belief, which it is not.

    They do this when saying that you can't say that this specific weather event can not be attributed to climate change, because statistics do not apply to single data points.

    They do this by conflating anecdotes with data.

    And they do this when they point at some cherry-picked detail where there still is some uncertainty and then zoom out saying, well if you can't sort that out, it's all bullshit.

    And the problem is that journalists, and the public are not trained to recognize these oratory tricks.

    Thanks, for pointing this out. We need more awareness of this.

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  2. Re. the 250 m headline: a while ago I came across a YouTube comment from someone who was genuinely concerned about the Andromeda galaxy colliding with ours. Which is about to happen ca. 4.5 billion years from now.

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