Paleontology for Dummies - The Freelance Files MMCCXII

Not all fossils are dinosaurs...

One of the staffers was recently reading a mystery-thriller when she concluded that the author had avoided taking any science courses on her way to a creative writing degree. Why? because any passage relating to the science was utterly clueless. It ruined an otherwise perfectly good book. We've noticed here at the Antisocial Network that creative writing (and journalism) majors tend to play fast and loose with STEM topics, especially when their "work" is edited by their fellow travelers in the liberal arts. That definitely includes C-W grad Maria Magher, who departed her mommyblogging comfort zone to pen "What Can We Learn by Studying Fossils?" for Sciencing.com.

Magher's qualifications to write about paleontology were immediately called into question based on her definition of a fossil in paragraph one:

"...the preserved remains of a once-living plant or animal";

Upon which our staffer wondered what a "never-living" (or perhaps "twice-living") plant or animal would be. Never mind that bit of dumbassery, though, because Maria sprinkled the rest of her content with misinformation like a Russian bot farm on a mission from Vlad. Try these statements on for size:

• "Paleontologists learn about how life existed on Earth thousands of years ago by excavating fossils buried deep in the ground " – Thousands of years ago? Is Magher a fan of Bishop Usher? and what's this "excavating" rubbish? The vast majority of fossils are found encased in solid rock, not dirt.
• "[fossils] often form because of cataclysmic events or through the organism's natural life and death cycle" – If that "information" were true, every organism that ever lived would have left a fossil. 
• "...paleontologists can also glean valuable information on how species that exist today survived in eras long past" –In this statement, A) Maria misused "era" and B) we learned that Maria didn't understand what a species is.
• "Scientists can put together how the plant or animal looked based on its skeletal structure, discover what the animals ate, and where they lived and how they died." – Scientists cannot "learn" these things, they can infer them mostly from their knowledge of similar lifeforms alive today. And as for "how they died," well, that's just a pipe dream. Even an idiot nows that most of them died of old age or predation.

"[A] drastic shift in climate led to the Ice Age, which killed off many species and changed life on Earth." – It's a shame Maria was unaware that there have been many "ice ages" in geologic history... "Scientists learn this information by determining the age of fossils that are discovered and studying other clues found in the same soil layers where they found the fossils." – We're sorry to have to tell Maria that most fossils aren't found in "soil layers," not to mention that her knowledge of age determination was clearly scanty.

It's distressingly obvious that Magher merely harvested what she considered facts from multiple sources to build a classic Dumbass of the Day nominee, content about paleontology written by a scientific illiterate. Heck, we know some fifth-graders who could recognize the fallacies in this drivel. Feh.

SI - PALEONTOLOGY