I have seen, elsewhere, claims that mammal specialists tend to be particularly sloppy in this regard, so I doubt that Ed has personally interpolated the description.

That’s my last word.

But it will be wrong. Full stop. End of argument. As I have said many times before, this serves no-one and is a frustrating and simple error, not made by *good* journlaists with *training*, and is made by poor journalists who lack the knowledge and experience to do it properly. You would not send a football expert to cover a political convention so why send a non-scientist to cover dinosaurs? I can repeat this till I am blue in the face and perhaps we have have to agree to disagree, but if they change wat the words mean, they are getting things wrong. Relatives are NOT ancestors and pterosaurs are NOT dinosaurs, just as Obama is NOT a republican and water is a molecule and NOT an atom. For some reason some of these errors are considered acceptable and some are not. Journalists should increase understanding and pass on knowledge, if they are not doing that, I fail to see what they are there for? Things can be made understandable without being changed.

‘I think we both know that you are not personally equipped to present material in such a way that a reporter won’t be tempted to violate it. That just means the work needs to be filtered through somebody else who has demonstrated such a skill. That person is almost certainly not a reporter or a publicist.’
Thanks for the studiedinsult, obviously writing papers, running blogs and science education website, teaching students, writing for popular magazines, and oh, yes, writing a dinosaur book and working as a consultant for the BBC clearly marks me out as inept. As I havewearily pointed out repeatedly to you, THIS IS NOT JUST ME. I can name dozens of scienists who will report exactly the smae failings of a multitude of journalists that I have laid out here, not least including BBC TV and Radio presenters who I happed to know who feel undermined by their own researchers (who I won’t embarass by naming here) not to mention entire blogs that are dedicated to this phenomenon alone (most notably the incredibly popular Bad Science). To suggest otherwise marks you out, not me. I have had a great deal of contact with journlaists of all kinds and all medias and am well awar eof the variety of styles of reporting and gaining of information.

I am not sure what you mean by a ‘publicist’, but yes, my work often goes through university PR departments, as does that of others. Again, it is irrelevant what one says when (as happend to Witton and Naish) pterosaurs are described as bird ancestors. How exactly does one proof against that? Must we point out each and every taxon that pterosaurs are not related to in each press releare, interview or blog post so it is not misreported?

‘What engages the public, instead, are the actual animals, how they fit into the natural world, how they lived, what they looked like, and whether they could swallow oneself or one’s offspring whole.’
What, like the work I and my colleagues do you mean? You really should read the press releases that go out, if you thing we jsut send abstracts to journalists and newspapers you are sorely misinformed. Half the time they call us having read the abstract and want to know more. I have to say you strike me as speaking from a position of ignornace here, I do not know about you it is true, but I have done a massive amount of media work and know many others who do, as well as people in the media itself, all this is based on my personal experience and that gained from close friends and colelagues. You criticse my way of writing to the media (apparently I do not have the ability) but I can’t remmeber the last time I sent you a press release. One more, and I hope for the last time, the good people get it right, if they can the rest can, they do not, how is this the error of the scientist. (And again a contradiction, you do not want to blame people, but apparently I am not doing it right – that looks like attributing blame form where I stand).

I suggest we close this argument – easy to say when it’s my blog, but then that’s largely the point. This is my blog and my forum for my ideas, endless repetition of arguments is pointless. I am interested in questions and debates, but you want the scientists to pander to the jounalists and I want them to pander to us. If you truly want an “I’m interested in having an informed, engaged, and inspired public.” then the must be given accurate information, if you not you might as well tell them anything. And if you think i am not helping, then I would point to the stuff I dod do outside of the media – it may reach far fewer people, but over 50 000 people have used Ask A Biologist (not to mention my other projects), so I think I am getting some members of the public interested, informed and inspired.

When reporters change statements, they’re changing them to be more interesting to (who they imagine to be) their readership. If they change “relative” to “ancestor”, it’s because they think that will engage their readers. Likewise if they change “pterosaur” to “dinosaur”. If the stories were engaging enough “as is”, they wouldn’t be motivated to change them. They typically have six or eight other stories they’re supposed to be finishing at the same time, so if anything can save them the trouble of rewriting, they will take it eagerly.

I think we both know that you are not personally equipped to present material in such a way that a reporter won’t be tempted to violate it. That just means the work needs to be filtered through somebody else who has demonstrated such a skill. That person is almost certainly not a reporter or a publicist.

One of the key differences between scientific presentation and public presentation is that the reported result typically has, in science, some esoteric, intolerably dull, and extremely temporary consequence, such as firmly negating an academic rival’s obviously insane proposition (e.g., azhdarchid skim feeding).
What engages the public, instead, are the actual animals, how they fit into the natural world, how they lived, what they looked like, and whether they could swallow oneself or one’s offspring whole.

What makes pterosaurs interestingly different from dinosaurs, for example, is not that they are neither saurischia nor ornithischia, but that their lineages split off, and evolved independently, for eons before any of the dinosaurs that readers ever heard of existed, and then were driven to extinction once dinosaurs finally got around to developing flight themselves using the markedly superior “feather” technology, leaving only the enormous azhdarchids and tapejarids to be devastated by that damned meteorite.

Nobody can teach you to present in such a way that reporters won’t violate the work, but it’s certainly possible that a corps of presenters could be rallied to reform results into a form that is stable against reportorial violation. That would be much better than hurling abstracts over the transom and complaining about the result.

Phylogeneticists are carefully conditioned not to be interested in direct ancestry. Normal people — readers of newspapers — are keenly interested. You consider the details that make it not-quite-ancestral to be trivial distractions. Newspaper readers want to know those details. They get frustrated at being teased with facts that means nothing to them, while the (to them) meaningful details are nowhere to be found.

Yes, superb science writers can get it right without losing their audience. What of the rest? You can excoriate them for trying as well as they can to construct something that will inspire their readers, or you can give them what they need so that they can inspire without getting it wrong. Details that affect your career belong in your own paper. Details about the actual animal belong in the newspaper. They are not the same.

The odds are overwhelming that no specimen will be on the direct line of ancestry to modern creatures; if one was, we wouldn’t be able to determine it. Nevertheless, even normal people know there is such a line, and they are interested in where a new species lies in relation to that line. That you don’t think they should be interested in such trivialities is your problem. What matters is that they are interested at all.

Biology has a unique place in Science. It is able to inspire, to engage the enthusiasm of people from all walks of life. That power can lead them to be willing to pay for all manner of scientific investigation. Squander it, and they mutter, instead, about dusty, arrogant eggheads. Which seems better to you?

It’s completely obvious that nobody can demonstrate that some random fossil *is* an ancestor of some modern creature. Repeating the fact at length enlightens nobody, but insults some.

I think most journalists do a horrifying job of getting their facts straight in news articles. I’ve seen way too many stories calling pterosaurs “flying dinosaurs” or dromaeosaurs “missing links.” Explain to me how Microraptor is a missing link between T.rex and a swan. Please, tell me how that works. In all cases, a simple Google search or Wikipedia check would tell the journalist all he/she needs to know to get the story right. Pterosaurs are, in fact, NOT dinosaurs. Neither are saber-toothed cats or plesiosaurs. You don’t see journalists calling marchairodont cats “dinosaurs.” I expect the same low level of journalistic excellence regarding non-crocodilian archosaurs.

And it’s not like you have to a trained scientist to understand the difference. As you know, Nathan, I do this on my spare time, yet I figured out that very basic fact more or less on my own a fifteen years ago. And that was BEFORE Google or Wikipedia. With virtually any piece of information a mere click away, I don’t think there is any excuse to get very basic facts about dinosaurs (and other prehistoric critters) right.

Back to the original question–Anchiornis cannot be directly ancestral to Archaeopteryx because it has its own suite of unique characters, among them a pitted coracoid and metacarpals II and III, which appear to be fused at their proximal ends. These features are not present in Archaeopteryx, so Anchiornis is not a suitable ancestor.

Not to belabor the matter, but I haven’t seen any hint of evidence that it isn’t ancestral to modern birds — and I did ask. Sure, it’s not especially likely, but it’s about equally as likely to be an ancestor as any other specimen. If you can identify anything about “might be an ancestor” that is actually incorrect, I’m all ears.

You can feed journalists awkward constructions that they (or their editors) will feel obliged to alter and get wrong, and then complain about them; or you can express results so that it’s less work for them to get it factually right than to mess it up. There’s no reason why what they print has to match what you would put in an abstract. It suffices if it’s informative and catchy.