Thunder lizard thunderer blunderer

Last week I picked up a copy of The Times on the train (as you do). There was a short article about a newly described short necked sauropod by someone called Mark Henderson (hmm, that name seems familar).

Here I’d like to rant about the crapness of The Times web site, about how the search feature directed to towards a so-called print friendly version of the article (hello, 2005, print CSS) - complete with (presumably) print friendly banner ads, and about how the very nice illustration from the paper version are entirely lacking from the web site.

Anyway, Brachytrachelopan mesa is a south american sauropod with a short neck, in fact it looks superfically rather like a hadrosaur (see the pic at the bottom of this post on Palaeoblog). As the hadrosaurs were mostly (entirely?) northen hemisphere residents it makes sense that some sort of southern hemisphere dinosaur would evolve to fill the same ecological niche and sauropods are the only major group of plant eating dinos in the southern continents.

But The Times claims that “the short neck of Brachytrachelopan appears to be an adaptation for feeding on shrubs and grasses”. Um, no. Grasses didn’t evolve until millions of years after the dinosaurs went extinct. None of the other sources carrying this story made this mistake so I guess that this Henderson fellow is at fault, I wonder where he learnt his science?

(Mark, if you read this, sorry if I come across as being a bit mean. For all I know the mistake was a sub-editor’s not yours, and maybe The Times even published a correction on Friday.)