THE RANDLE REPORT

BBC WILDLIFE MAKING A PIG'S EAR OUT OF PALEONTOLOGY

Tempus fugit, and not always in a good way.

When I wrote Blinded with Science, I thought most of the depths of scientific hogwash had been plumbed. But, until its present re-run on BBC2, I had been spared one of the most blatant packs of palaeontological porkies ever assembled for the bamboozlement of Big Science’s adoring and devout congregations: the excruciatingly idiotic Planet Dinosaur.

Like many other young folk, I was knee-high to a micropachycephalosaurus when I fell under the spell of the reptilian leviathans who allegedly ruled this planet in the Mesozoic era.

If you want to capture young minds and indoctrinate them into bogus dogma, dinosaurs are the way to go, and this thing goes there big time.

Using mediocre CGi animations and frequent repetitions of the word ‘incredible’, this infantile confection of grisly set-ups and speculation pits ever more ludicrously named reptilians against each other to the accompaniment of various grunts and squawks, while the voice-over merchant describes the action in the present tense to try and reinforce the delusion that it ever happened in the past.

In the only episode I ever want to have seen, new discoveries are purported to have strengthened the shaky, if not structurally unsafe, proposition that these superannuated lizards evolved into modern birds. If evolution in the Darwinian sense ever occurred at all, this transformation would require a staggering number of coordinated skeletal and muscular upheavals, during which the changeling would not be much good for anything other than fast food.

We are told that some of the newly-discovered fossil dinosaurs came complete with feathers. Birds have feathers, so that makes them part-bird, apparently. Tarantulas have hair, so I guess that makes them part-human.

The narration goes on to report that the favoured dinos used their bonus plumage for one of two reasons, the main one being to ‘keep warm’.

Unless some other scientific sleight of hand has deceived the eye, dinosaurs, if they were dinosaurs, as in reptiles, would have been cold-blooded - i.e., they would gain whatever heat they had from the environment. So there was no warm to ‘keep’. Feathers would have had the opposite effect, and might well have been useful rather in protecting the wearer from intense heat - dissipating it in the manner of modern day lizards, who hold one leg at a time in the air as a heat-exchanger in desert conditions.

The second reported use was to shake a tail feather at some cretacean cutie with a view to intimacy.

T-Rexes and allosauri must, we imagine, have got it together from time to time, but it’s not easy to picture quite that degree of delicacy playing a big part in their amorous encounters, especially as anything that stays still for any length of time on Planet D seems to become a ready meal for something bigger and even uglier.

The only real educational value of this digital débacle is to demonstrate the process of finding a few bits of bone (and the occasional feather), creating a fiction for it, assigning it a dog Graeco-Latin taxonomy based on a minor aspect of its appearance, and then insisting that it lives up to its new name in thought and deed, that constitutes the cutting edge of learnèd classification.

Otherwise, such cynical rubbish is not just doing prehistory a disservice; it has the more sinister purpose of trying to confer omniscience on a science in its infancy.

I watched to the end in the vain hope that a porkypigosaurus would come on and squawk: ‘Th-th-that’s all folks.’

From BLINDED WITH SCIENCE available from The Book Depository