My Permian Poem

I’ve recently been making an effort to get back to using Twitter regularly as it is a fantastic place to interact with scientists and science communicators, keep up with advances in science along with how science news is being received within the scientific community, and it’s a great platform for self-promotion (I fail at the latter no matter what the platform). One of my favourite sci-comm accounts on Twitter is PalaeoPoems, a page which shares palaeontology-themed poetry and offers writing prompts, like this:

Now that you've had ample time to get to know your local geology, we're bringing back this #PalaeoPoemsPrompt from last year. Reply to this tweet with a poem about fossils that are as local as possible to your area! #FossilFriday https://t.co/LzdVaUBEEj

— PalaeoPoems (@Palaeopoems) April 23, 2021

I used this prompt to quickly write my own poem about my local palaeontology. here’s what I had to offer:

I need to talk about that tiny stegosaur footprint

Image credit: Kaitoge

I don’t have anything I want to add to the story about the tiny stegosaur footprint found in China, nothing which can’t be found in the press release or the journal paper, despite stegosaurs being one of my favourite dinosaur groups and having an interest in trace fossils. And I have nothing I want to say about how the story is being reported (like I quickly did with this footprint story). I just want to adore how cute it is. The reconstruction pictured above, by Kaitoge, is absolutely adorable, as is the actual fossil itself (pictured below). So what I will do is look at some of the headlines, particularly as some of those emphasise the cuteness. It’s a spectacular find regardless of the cute factor but that is a great way to catch the eye – it worked for me.

The biggest dinosaur print in Yorkshire that wasn’t…

Some of those headlines you might have seen are wrong. And if you read the articles themselves, you’ll see a quotation from Dean Lomax (my good friend and podcast co-host) which contains more accurate information. I’m talking about this news story, including this misleading headline from the BBC:

Everyone should be allowed to talk about science

Scientific topics are often in the public eye, ranging from less controversial topics like a new rover on Mars, to those which get everyone arguing, like climate change. This past year has seen the public engaging with the science behind viruses, pandemics, viral testing, vaccination and more. Naturally, there are a lot of uninformed views getting some traction, some deliberately misleading, and some people clearly just don’t care enough about what they have seen.

A year ago, just a few weeks into the first UK lockdown, I shared an image on Facebook accompanied by a rant, which I will repeat here in a bit more detail.

A six-year-old boy finds a fossil in his garden and nobody knows how to report it

Finding your first fossil can be a wonderful experience, unforgettable for many. What you hold in your hand in that moment is something that nobody else has seen, an object which has been untouched, hidden away for millions upon millions of years. Each fossil has its own story to tell about the life of a long-extinct organism, its death and burial, the processes which occurred to turn life into rock, the constantly-changing landscape which led from this remnant of ancient life being buried deep underground, only to be thrust back up to the surface where erosion allowed it to eventually be found. We can place each fossil in its evolutionary context, part of the ongoing story of life on Earth. We can place each fossil in its geographical context, tracing it back to a world very different from ours, often in oceans where now there is land, as sea levels rose and fell, climates fluctuated, and continents drifted. Some carry that feeling with them whenever they find a new fossil, knowing that every new find is a unique mark of prehistoric life.

There is a story doing the rounds today about a six-year-old boy from Walsall (UK) who found a fossil whilst digging in his garden. It’s a nice, feel-good story and I hope that it helps ignite a passion for fossils in the young lad, along with the potential to get others interested in finding their own fossils. However, the story is lacking some important details which would make it useful. The reporting has been exceptionally sloppy, with each article I’ve found repeating the same information and not bothering to do any simple fact checking.

Image credit: Vish Singh/PA

Rugby? Baseball? Vertebrate origins? When sports metaphors complicate science writing

It’s the final ten minutes of a rugby (union) match, you’ve just been awarded a penalty in a kickable position in your opponent’s half and you’re four points down, do you take the easier three points or do you kick for the corner? Don’t worry if that made no sense to you, it was meant to only make sense to people who just happen to enjoy rugby, and I have no idea how many people love both palaeontology and rugby, or are interested in science writing and rugby. That’s part of the point. I’m also writing this over what should have been the final weekend of the 6 Nations competition, so I’ve got rugby on the brain (one match had to be rearranged due to players testing positive for Covid-19, so the usual Super Saturday is not the end this year).

Johnny Wilkinson lining up a penalty for England against Scotland. Image source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/theedinburghblog/2322198326

There are a number of ways to score points in rugby union. A penalty, when kicked between the posts, awards three points and is often the safe option if the team has a good kicker. A try, where the ball is touched down over the opponent’s try line, awards five points and gives the team’s kicker a chance to score a conversion for a further two points (called a converted try), which again involves kicking the ball between the posts. When a team is awarded a penalty, they can choose to go for the posts if they are close enough, or they can kick it into touch (off the field of play at the side of the pitch) and can take a line-out (a type of throw in) from a better attacking position, which in this scenario would mean that they have the confidence to try to score a try and win the game in one go, rather than take the easier three points and hope to score again before time is up.

In this metaphor, taking the easier three points and hoping to score again represents science writing without using metaphors, particularly sports metaphors. It’s safer as it doesn’t risk alienating readers who are unable to follow the metaphor, and it doesn’t require understanding something potentially obscure – science can be difficult enough to communicate without having to force the reader to try to work out the rules (called laws in rugby) of a particular sport – but it can also risk boring the audience and losing them. Kicking for the corner is high-risk high-reward and so is using sports metaphors. If it works, it can turn a potentially dry science story into something with a bit of life. If it fails, it makes the science even harder to understand. Good science writing prevents the reader from needing to look things up, whether it’s scientific terminology or the ins and outs of a metaphor.

The Texas newspaper which dabbled in creationism

A few days ago I saw an Independent article covering something which I thought I might write about. The article was titled Texas newspaper publishes editorial claiming humans and dinosaurs walked the Earth at the same time. I felt like the blog post would practically write itself, after all, young earth creationism is an easy target, it’s easy to debunk and it should really receive any press coverage, even in an op-ed for a newspaper with around 3,000 readers.

I planned on maybe talking about why editors shouldn’t publish anti-science articles by Meals on Wheels directors, though I don’t think they should publish such articles by people with science degrees either. The Independent article mentioned that the author referenced pictures on cave walls which looked like dinosaurs, and the carvings on the Babylonian Ishtar Gate, some things I could potentially have quickly exposed.

I even thought that I might use this as a chance to mention what every palaeontologist likes to drop into conversation whenever the opportunity arises – that dinosaurs and humans do live side by side, as birds are dinosaurs. But it seems pointless to put that much effort in now that I do have a chance to write about it.

Why bait COVID deniers when Mars is right there? An eye-catching press release title which didn’t go viral

Mainstream news constantly shifts its focus, with new topics cycling in and out of the public’s immediate attention. Some go on to dominate, constantly bombarding us with relevant updates whilst smaller news items disappear quickly. When a story monopolises the news, new terminology becomes widely heard and enters the public lexicon. With the news cycle currently focusing on all things COVID, the term false positive has been thrown around a lot, particularly when testing was becoming more widely available. COVID deniers leapt on the concept of the false positive, where a test could come back with a positive result despite not actually detecting the virus. Their understanding of false positives was lacking but this did not prevent those two words from spreading in tandem, often found in the comments sections of any coronavirus-related article. So it came as a bit of a surprise to see this phrase being used in the title of a press release on an obscure bit of palaeontology.

https://phys.org/news/2021-01-early-life-full-false-positives.html

Seeing this had me wondering whether they have intentionally used a phrase which is currently in vogue, particularly with COVID deniers, in order to get more attention. It’s not out of the question, though it could just be coincidence as the phrase is a common scientific term, despite not appearing in the paper’s title or abstract. I wanted to take a quick look at whether this abstract title got the attention of any news sites, what angle those sites took, and present what I think could have been a better approach to take if publicity was their aim.

Why should space matter to fossil nerds?

I’m not an astronomer by any means, not even an amateur, I don’t even own a proper telescope. Yet lately I seem to be writing about space quite a lot. I’ve drawn a couple of pictures about space and I’ve written some posts on the subject, though I wouldn’t consider myself to be that well informed. It’s just that space can actually be quite relevant to palaeontology.

I recently saw a post on Facebook about Perseverance rover (which I’ve also written about) and was shocked to see someone in the comments claiming to be a scientist (a chemist if I remember correctly) as. they saw any sort of space exploration as a waste of funding. They believed that we need to focus on the conservation of our own planet and fighting climate change. What made it even worse to read, for me personally, was that this person also claimed to have studied a lot of palaeontology during their degree. I feel like the overlap between palaeontology and astronomy provides excellent insight into the interconnectedness of science and how disparate fields can affect one another. I’m going to keep this very brief as I feel like it shouldn’t really need saying.

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.