Forum Replies Created
-
Well, there was an 8ft long centipede/millipede relative that lived 300 million years ago named Arthropleura…
Not sure what you have against insects.
I know some are icky but insects are people too. Show them more respect.
I have nothing against them; I’m just tired of enabling them.
It’s about time they learned to stand on their own six feet.
Actually, that study that article is based on has come under some criticism.
First of all, it was a review of only 73 studies. That’s not a lot when looking at ‘global’ insect populations. Secondly, most of the studies they looked at came from Europe and the US. Here again, it doesn’t tell us much about global populations.
The biggest problem is that the research focused only on exploring the already declining insect populations. It did not include the studies showing stable and growing populations. So, if you were studying the survival of the human species but limited your data to people with end stage kidney disease, it would lead you to the conclusion that humanity would be extinct in the next 5 years.
Here’s more…
Basically the New Yorker article about the Tanis site has caused quite a controversy in scientific circles.
Apparently it was a no-no for the lead author of the study to collaborate with the New Yorker on an article on research that wasn’t published yet, or at least, not available to the scientific community. The paper is now available and was read by Dr Steve Brusette, who tweeted about it above. Apparently, the lead investigator (DePalma) has a reputation of making a discovery and then running to the press. I know he took some flack in the past for jumping the gun causing him to mistake turtle bones for Dakotaraptor, (a big velociraptor-like dinosaur).
Nobody questions that the site isn’t incredible, but the actual research paper doesn’t mention a lot of stuff in the article. The site is supposedly a dinosaur ‘graveyard’, but only one partial dinosaur bone is mentioned in the paper even though the New Yorker article says that feathers, eggs with embryos, and representatives of every dinosaur from the Hell Creek formation were found at the site. None of this is mentioned in the study. In fact, according to Brussette, the actual study wasn’t about dinosaurs at all.
So, he and a lot of others are asking, “what gives?”
I’m a scientist. That’s because I post stuff about science. It’s true that I can’t do the math. But, that’s just a technicality.
You drink, and you post things.
