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
From BLINDED WITH SCIENCE available from The Book Depository
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