The robot palaeontologist on Mars

It’s probably old news by now but NASA landed its Perseverance rover on Mars on the 18th of February after a seven month trip, which has started transmitting images and sound recordings back to Earth. Its mission is to take samples and search for signs of potential past habitable conditions on the Martian surface, including the possibility of finding evidence of ancient Martian microbial life. Put simply, Perseverance is going to be doing palaeontology… hopefully.

Illustration of NASA’s Perseverance rover. Image credit JPL-Caltech/NASA

When we go out hunting for fossils on Earth, the first step is to choose the right locality. It’s pretty easy when you want to search in areas which have been explored before, like with the Whitby coast (England), as so many fossils have been found there that it is not difficult to find books and websites detailing exactly where to look and what you can expect to find. There are no books on Martian palaeontology (though if someone has jokingly written one, please let me know), so scientists in search of extra-terrestrial fossils must use other means for narrowing down where to search.

I’m not reading that, I already know what killed the dinosaurs

Perhaps the easiest way a science news story can go wrong is by messing up the headline. Headlines are often written by people who haven’t written the article and, sometimes, it seems that they haven’t even read it first. It’s not unusual to find that it contradicts the content of the article. Science headlines suffer from the need to simplify something complex, which can lead potential readers wondering why they should care about what is being announced. The headline helps people decided whether to click a link and it affects how they interpret the article. Headlines are important. And I say that as someone who neglects the titles of his own blogposts (sometimes I feel like I’m deliberately making them bad).

In the past week I saw an article on Facebook which looked like an attempt to get as few clicks as possible. Either that, or it was a completely genius idea which forced people to click just to see why it was being claimed as news. Some headlines suffer because they claim something we think we already know. It’s unlikely that we know what is mentioned in the article but we’d need to click the link to find out what that is. Sure enough, I looked at the comments and found people stating incredulously that they already knew this, we’ve known it for years, how is this news? Here’s the offending headline from the Independent:

An accidental coelacanth, a shoddy press release, and a hefty dose of pedantry

Modern coelacanth. Image source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gfp-coelacanth-fish.jpg

I woke up this morning and did the usual scroll through social media before doing anything productive. I don’t normally read science articles when I’ve just woken up but this one caught my bleary eye. The headline read, “Enormous ancient fish fossil discovered in search of pterodactyl remains,” and it must have worked as I clicked the link (either that or a comment on the post made me want to see more). It’s not the headline I want to talk about, though the way that one is written makes it sound like the fish died in the act of searching for pterosaur remains, but instead one small error in the press release which bugged me.

Trace fossils, a severed penis, and a touch of science fiction

Eunice aphroditois – the Bobbit worm. Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Eunice_aphroditois.jpg

On the 21st of January a scientific paper was published which I reckon provides good insight into how science is reported to the public, something I’m interested in exploring on this blog (see my outline here).

The team of researchers, mostly from Taiwan, published a study in Scientific Reports detailing their interpretation of 20 million-year-old fossilised burrows which might have been dug by an ancestral form of a fascinating modern worm, or at least might demonstrate the same predatory tactics. Burrows are a common type of trace fossil – a geological feature which provides evidence of animal behaviour. Trace fossils such as these give insight into ancient animal feeding behaviours and few fossilised examples of hunting behaviours exist for invertebrates, so they already have some value as a science news story, particularly as modern Bobbit worms feed on vertebrates. Trace fossils (also known as ichnofossils) can provide evidence of organisms which haven’t themselves preserved as fossils, such as those with soft bodies. They are an invaluable resource for studying ancient ecosystems.

How Things Work: this blog

I used to write about new finds in palaeontology and evolution, back when I was studying for my BSc and had the ability and motivation to blog regularly. I’m not sure I ever really added anything of real value most of the time; I was just another voice repeating what could be found in the press releases, only occasionally adding my own insight or attempt at a witty take. There are plenty of news sites and blogs doing that, including some which make the effort to contact academics for quotations and other perspectives – I don’t have that in me. I want to start taking a different approach.

Science goes through a number of filters before it reaches the public online. Sometimes, it goes straight from a published article in a journal to a science writer publishing a blog or online magazine article, filtered only by the ideas of the writer in question. Most of the time, the authors of the journal article write a press release, which journalists and bloggers use as the foundation of their reporting. I’m interested in looking at what happens each step of the way and how this can distort scientific findings, particularly in palaeontology.