Did sauropods support their weight by living in vast shallow lakes?
April 3, 2012
No. No, they did not.
(That’s occasional SV-POW! reader/commenter Paul Barrett in the back half of that audio clip, being amazingly restrained.)
Turns out that the published work this interview is based on is this one in Laboratory News. No references, no hint that it’s been peer-reviewed, no illustrations that are more convincing than this one:
And, unsurprisingly enough, the article is complete nonsense. “We accept the remains of their footprints without demur, although for such gigantic creatures the imprints that we observe in rocky strata make no sense. The prints are roughly as deep in the layers of Liassic mud as ours might have been, although the high mass of an adult dinosaur would cause it to sink up to its knees. The footprints seem to be those of an altogether lighter organism.” Yes, they would — to someone ignorant of all the work that’s been done on dinosaur biomechanics and tracks. A cell biologist operating way outside his area, for example.
What a complete waste of time and energy.
Matt and I have often talked about how valuable the contributions of amateurs can be in science in general, and palaeo in particular. And then some asshat comes along and takes a dump in the living room. And now the world is full of interested laymen all telling each other “actually, the latest theory is that they did live in swamps after all!”
The Today Programme should be ashamed of itself for running such nonsense. In scientific terms, it’s on a par with Young-Earth Creationism or Geocentricism. And that wouldn’t have been hard for them to have found out.
I wonder if we could get them to run a retraction?