Oh Metro! Part Whatever...

[davegodfrey]

Some of you may have seen this paper at PLoS ONE. Its a rather nifty piece of work by Darren Naish and Mark Witton (who's very nice drawings accompany the article itself, and the various newspaper reports.)

Basically a group of pterosaurs called Azdarchids have always been a bit of a problem for palaeontologists working out their lifestyle. They're

Comments

[matgb]

The Guardian My only criticism is the translation of pterosaur as "winged lizard", which I don't like, simply because they're not lizards, and "reptile" seems to be an equally valid (and these days, more common) translation

FWIW, Wikipedia uses winged lizard, as does the second Google result, Berkeley.

D'you reckon we might get valid coverage of science in the popular press ever?

[davegodfrey]

Lizard is probably the more accurate translation, but lots of my children's dinosaur books used reptile, probably to emphasise the point that most of the things they were talking about weren't lizards. (Except for T. rex which is always "King of the Tyrant Lizards").

I doubt we'll ever get decent coverage of science in the press. Its too easy to skim the press release and not care too much when you make really big errors. Make the same mistake in a football column, and you'll have mobs with flaming torches and pitchforks at your door.

[maureenlycaon]

Excellent media roundup! Thank you.

And omg, the Tetrapod Zoology article. It actually makes me wish that I could take more of an interest in pterosaurs. One of the finest SciBlogs articles and comment threads ever.