Posted on 08/04/2020 8:17:27 AM PDT by fishtank
Scientists Retract Dino-Bird Paper
August 3, 2020 | Jerry Bergman
Was it a Bird or a Dinosaur? The Latest Guess is Neither. It’s a Lizard!
An Example of Guesswork in Paleontology
by Jerry Bergman, PhD
A recent fossil find preserved in amber looked a lot like a bird, but a Nature headline proclaimed it to be a dinosaur.[1] It has now been determined to be a lizard! Its final classification can be debated, but it cannot be debated that it is a good story which illustrates the degree of guesswork in the field of paleontology. As is often said about the weather, if you don’t like it, wait for a day or so and it will change. Sometimes the same is true about the confident claims in science news. Mark Twain joked that Brontosaurus consisted of “nine bones and six hundred barrels of plaster of Paris.” One of the many examples that documents this problem of over-eager speculation is the following story.
(Excerpt) Read more at crev.info ...
"The original article was published on March 11, 2020 in one of the most prestigious science magazines on Earth, Nature, founded on November 4, 1869.
One of Nature’s early supporters was biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, a heavyweight of Victorian science and a staunch ally of Charles Darwin (so was John Tyndall; see yesterday’s entry).
Huxley was known as ‘Darwin’s bulldog’. The magazine was a pro-Darwin venue from the beginning and tended to focus on publishing articles that supported Darwinism.
The article reviewed here is no exception, although no connection to evolution was noted in the original paper."
Classification is very arbitrary.
When I studied nematodes, we would cut off their rear ends, flatten it on a slide and look for patterns.
I always thought sitting people bear assed naked on a copier and looking for patterns would be better classification than skin color.
“It’s a bird!”
“It’s a plane!”
“It’s a frog.”
“Not bird nor plane or even frog! It’s little old me, Underdog.”
They should have tested to see if the Amber had a c14 date.
Somebody is behind the times. This is already old news.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2068-4
Link is to the retraction notice on July 22nd. Still a cool fossil.
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