Palaeo Fail
is a Tumblr blog that chronicles various fails in paleontology.
There was also a companion blog called "Palaeofail Explained" explaining the various fails to the uninitiated, which has been rebranded as "Fossils and the People Who Love Them".
Tropes
- All Flyers Are Birds: A particularly odd variant; one fail came from someone who's apparently convinced that any animal with feathers is automatically able to fly.
- Artistic License – Paleontology: The whole point of the blog is to call out people who perpetuate this trope.
- Special mention goes to this comic, which gets multiple points about dinosaur plumage wrong:
- For starters, it claims that no non-avian dinosaurs had complex avian plumage and instead they were mostly scaly with "feather-like quills on only the heads, arms and tail tips". This is incorrect—there are many dinosaurs that were covered in feathers from head to tail. We know this because the feathers were preserved with their skeletons. The generic raptor portrayed in the comic should indeed be covered with full birdlike feathers as a result.
- The ending implies that the artist thinks pterosaurs are dinosaurs. Barring the fact that they're not, the artist also insinuates that pterosaurs would not have had a fibrous covering at all, when we've known since the 1970s that they did, it just wasn't feathers, it was a furlike structure of a similar origin (now known as pycnofibres). Ironically, the depiction in the comic is quite accurate, despite the obvious intention being that it shouldn't be.
- The comic artist seems convinced that the people arguing for plumage are rallying for feathers on sauropods, ceratopsians and spinosaurids. While spinosaurids are debatable, there are no science-minded individuals clamoring for plumage on Triceratops or any known sauropod. We have skin impressions from both animals, and neither shows any sign of feathers. If they do argue for feathery horn-heads or longnecks, they're almost certainly doing so speculatively.
- Ironically, the blog has made a few as well. For instance, this shot from an old children's book depicting a winged Ankylosaur called "Aeolosaurus" was put under the tags, "failaeoart" and "absolute idiots". The art in question is from a quiz asking kids to identify made-up dinosaurs, with the "Aeolosaurus" being one of the phonies. So it was never meant to be taken seriously at all!note You think the inclusion of "Rhedosaurus" would have tipped them off.
- Special mention goes to this
- Fate Worse than Death: The joke behind the "kill me" tag, depictions/reconstructions of prehistoric animals so bad that they look like they actually want to die.
- I Am Not Weasel: Everything under the "Not a dinosaur" tag. They can range from the typical (grouping marine reptiles and pterosaurs with dinosaurs) to the ridiculous (calling a great white shark a dinosaur).
- Raptor Attack: Also very commonly brought up. Particularly noteworthy examples can be found in the "feather haters" and BANDits behaving badly tags.
