We all love a good story, particularly if it involves ancient sea monsters big enough to take down ships. But when you start hearing from scientists that those same sea monsters were expressing themselves artistically (see photo above), it may be time for journalists to question the difference between a good story and solid science.
Monday afternoon at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America (GSA) in Minneapolis, a well-known geologist claimed that he has discovered the lair of 100-foot-long (30-meter-long) kraken that terrorized the seas 215 million years ago. Seems pretty cool, right?
Fine. But let’s be crystal clear up front: there is no direct evidence of such a monster’s existence, let alone its intelligence. The entire tale is based on an untested hypothesis about a puzzling pile of bones that happen to belong to what were otherwise that era’s top marine predators: school-bus-sized ichthyosaurs.
Shortly after death, the bodies of nine of these air-breathing, fish-shaped lizards, ended up peculiarly aligned, side-by-side, deep down on a piece of the the seafloor now exposed in the Nevada desert. When paleontologist Mark McMenamin of Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts visited the fossil site this summer, it reminded him of a octopus midden, the pile of debris this animal piles up to conceal the entrance of its den.
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And now McMenamin is saying that a giant kraken, twice the size of the modern Colossal Squid, drowned or broke the necks of these ichthyosaur victims before bringing them home for dinner.
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Trying to rule out natural causes for their death, McMenamin cites evidence that the ichthyosaurs all died at different times, rather than in some mass catastrophe. The water in which they were buried was too deep for them to have been stranded in a tidal flat, for instance.
Okay, maybe. But what do you make of McMenamin’s claim that he sees as “purpose” in the way the reptiles’ disk-shaped vertebrae are laid out? In the fossil bed, they form double line pattern “with individual pieces nesting in a fitted fashion as if they were part of a puzzle,” he writes. The pattern looks so similar to the pattern of sucker discs on an octopus tentacle, he continues, that it “may represent the earliest known self-portrait.”
Really? C'mon.
Lest you CSI fans try to outsmart him, McMenamin points out that disks from different parts of the spinal column are juxtaposed, ruling out the possibility that the contraction of ligaments after death could account for the bizarre pattern. After all, he writes, this kraken “could have been the most intelligent invertebrate ever.”
And that’s precisely the impression the vast majority of science journalists fed the tens of thousands of people who have “liked” one or more of the three-dozen versions of the conference press release posted in the first 12 hours after McMenamin’s announcement went public. Your challenge: Find one that bothered to get an outside comment.
For better or worse, it’s not only the newshounds who are making noise. In the wee hours today, someone updated the last line of McMenamin’s Wikipedia entry to include his latest news: "He has earned the nickname McMinimal from his colleagues due to the perceived poor quality of his research, such as suggesting that Agnostids are cannibals and claiming that the Kraken was a real beast."
IMAGE:
Ichthyosaur vertebrae arranged in linear patterns with almost geometric regularity, resembling the pattern of sucker discs on an cephalopod tentacle. (Photo courtesy Mark McMenamin)
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