TigerHawk

TigerHawk (ti*ger*hawk): n. 1. The title of this blog and the nom de plume of its founding blogger; 2. A deep bow to the Princeton Tigers and the Iowa Hawkeyes; 3. The nickname for Iowa's Hawkeye logo. Posts include thoughts of the day on international affairs, politics, things that strike us as hilarious and personal observations. The opinions we express are our own, and not those of each other, our employers, our relatives, our dead ancestors, or unrelated people of similar ethnicity.

Thursday, July 19, 2007

Inflammatory science lede of the week

By TigerHawk at 7/19/2007 09:55:00 PM

True or not, this lede is bound to raise some hackles:

Dinosaurs had sex well before they reached full physical maturity, just as crocodiles and people can, research now reveals.

Let's hope that we people dominate our ecological niche as long and as completely as the dinosaurs.

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5 Comments:

By GreenmanTim, at Thu Jul 19, 10:38:00 PM:

There are other explanations for reproducing before reaching full maturity that might apply to these fossils. Species from severely depleted popuations may reproduce earlier and more frequently to try and rebuild their numbers. Elephants in herds that are under severe hunting pressure will do this. American elms are setting seed at much younger stages of growth, as half the mature elms have been wiped out by Dutch Elm Disease. So the fact that there are two adolescent fossils here from two dinosaur species that were buried on eggs might have more to say about dinosaur behavior during an extinction event than under normal circumstances. Having not read the report, I do not know whether the fossils date from the extinction of the species or earier in the fossil record.

By Anonymous, at Fri Jul 20, 12:42:00 AM:

Err, call me slow, but what's so inflammatory about this? Is it controversial that 13 year olds can get pregnant or something?

By Purple Avenger, at Fri Jul 20, 12:54:00 AM:

There are amazing logical leaps of faith in that article since the sample size is so small.

ex. How do they even know the "mother" is even the real mother and not some other juvenile individual who happened to be raiding the nest at the time? Nest raiding is a fairly common tactic that continues even today.

Presuming proximity equates to causality is a fundamental logic flaw.

That this sort of speculative twaddle passes for science reporting these days is very disturbing to me since the piece doesn't present this as a speculative theory rather foists it off as fact.

By Anonymous, at Fri Jul 20, 12:55:00 AM:

How do you suppose SHARPTOOTH,LONGTAIL and THREE HORN make whoopy?

By Anonymous, at Fri Jul 20, 01:04:00 AM:

Carefully?