We here at ksjtracker got a tip this week with a link and an intriguing and terse message led by: Almost every part of this headline is wrong.
The email is from Jim Handman, senior producer of the CBC's Quirks & Quarks radio show in Canada, which is an excellent program. And Handman's summary is absolutely correct. Here is the story at the end of the link:
- Canada.com (aka Postmedia News, in the chain led by the National Post): Jurassic Park turns reality as ancient mosquito's blood meal found in fossil ;
The real news is that a team of scientists from the US (Smithsonian Institution, Carnegie Institution), Sweden, and the UK published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences a 5-page report on what mass spectrometry analysis discovered in the abdomen of a mosquito preserved for 46 million years in shale formed at the bottom of an ancient lake in Montana. It bears the signature of heme, a component of hemoglobin, implying blood, and implying in turn that mosquitoes back then sucked blood just as modern ones do. That is no surprise. Experts assumed as much. But most scientists will take evidence, even if it is a bit inferential as here, over mere presumption any day. The paper does mention the movie Jurassic Park. But that is only as a cultural reference en route to pointing out that DNA cannot last very long, not 46 million years and even more certainly not for the much longer time since non-avian dinosaurs died out. Some proteins do leave signatures for times as long as that and they do provide some useful scientific info. Crichton's and Spielberg's dino-cloning premise of mosquito-wrapped T-rex DNA remains pure fiction.
But before anybody goes all tabloid-averse over this markedly opportunistic headline, one must hastily point out that the fault occurred after the story itself entered the Postmedia domain. It is a wire story. Here is an example without the offending hed and with a respected byline:
- AP/via Huff Post – Seth Borenstein: Mosquito Fossil Holding 46-Million-Year-Old Blood Meal Discovered, Called First Of Its Kind ; Borenstein does bring up Jurassic Park too but, as did the authors of the PNAS paper, and only to say this dead skeeter is not an example of Crichton's fiction becoming fact. After all, to write a yarn about ancient blood inside mosquito fossils and NOT mention that series of movies would be pretty hard to do.
The lesson is an old one, every reporter having experienced first hand. No matter how hard one works to write the story while cleaving hard to truth and plausibility, if one is not standing around to yell STOP when the headline lands on it one may later spit one's coffee across the place mat when reading the published result.
Not many other outlets picked this interesting news up. Here is what comes easily to view. Some of these, in a few cases with the collusion of hte reporter, fell victim to the same fevered movie mania exaggeration as did Borenstein's story when PostMedia's wire editor or somebody like that got hold of it:
- NY Daily News – Michael Walsh: Blood-filled mosquito fossil buoys geeks' hopes of real-life 'Jurassic Park' ; including one pic of the fossil and two movie stills. Oh, it also has another real science pic, of fossilized insects, but seems to think they are in shale like the one in the PNAS study. No, its other examples are in amber.
- LiveScience – Douglas Main: Rare fossil of blood engorged mosquito found in Montana ;
- The Australian – John Ross: Mosquito fossil 'won't yield dino DNA' ;
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