Of all the scientific blunders the original WWD series spewed out, this is the most egregious. How can you, in all fairness, take the holotype of a 6 meter long pliosaurid and say it was actually 4-5 times longer and weighted 150 tons? Where did they get the source for that?>crackpipe.jpgMakes sense
>>5041921Gotta make shit up to get people interested in dinosaurs
>>5041930slightly unrelated annecdote but heyI have a friend who got into journalism. got a degree and all. Turns out the reality of today is that people are incredibly dumb, hard to interest in anything, and have the attentionspan of the humble common housefly. The result is that everybody who's work depends on the people's attention just HAS to either make bullshit up to get people interested or make grandiloquent claims here and there to hook their attention
>>5042008to be fair it worked on 6yo me. since then i have had a strong passion for dinosaurs and palaeontology in general. but i think they could've used something else to portray their big predator, something more believable like a kronosaur. i think liopleurodon in wwd was just bongs wanking themselves over the allged fact that the "biggest carnivore in the history of earth" was found in england.
>>5041921It was controversial even at the time it aired, pliosaurs are overall quite fragmentary in their skeletons and material, unlike their long-necked cousins.In the Oxford Clay formation, there were fragmentary remains that they used as a basis that they estimated to be such a size from some vertebrae that suggested it was that size from current estimates and the understanding on pliosaurs. Re-analysis of course revealed the 20+ meter estimates were way oversized.
>>5041921yes it was dishonest, but it was also kino and terrifying
>>5042218>holy shit, i'm going bald. maybe i should starting working oACK
