The Daily Fail have struck again, this time the poor victim being the rather cool fossil, Metoposaurus diagnosticus. Metoposaurus is an amphibious, er, amphibian from Germany, Italy, Poland and Portugal, and a member of a group called temnospondyls. However, three times in an article published yesterday, the innocent amphibian is labeled as a ‘dinosaur’ – what did it ever to to deserve such dishonour!
Screenshot from the article (source)
So I was browsing for content for future blog posts the other day, and came across this video from Friends (the show people of my era grew up with).
Ross is a palaeontologist, so naturally one of the coolest, smartest and sexiest of all the science breeds, but takes a little dig at geologists here in a social context.
Now compare that to this video from American Dad, in which geologists are portrayed in the opposite manner, in a James Bond-y way.
So have any of you ever experienced a social stereotyping or generalisation of some sort, positive or negative, when people find out you’re a geologist (or geoscientist of some sort), or have known about it for a while? On a personal level, I get called ‘the dinosaur man’ quite a bit at university, but that’s more of a sub-affectionate jibe, I think. Interested to know what y’all may have experienced!
Some dinosaurs were utterly bizarre. You may have heard of them before, but one particular group called therizinosaurs belonged to the meat-eating theropod dinosaurs (those that led to birds), were really awesome. However, they actually at some point made a conscious evolutionary decision to stop being badasses, and become Cretaceous-cauliflower* munching pansies.
A lot of recent(ish) posts featured on this blog have been about the evolution of flight and feathered dinosaurs. I promised to kick this habit, and write about something different, but this video by Carl Zimmer adds a really nice narrative to the story and is quite a nice little overview for anyone interested.
If you have any questions about bird-like fossils, feathers, their function, or dino-birds in general, pop them in the comments and I’ll see what I can do! Stay tuned for the latest in the #OpenPhD series, and more cool palaeo stuff. 🙂
