
All Those New Dinosaurs May Not Be New Or Dinosaurs - Petiver
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/all-those-new-dinosaurs-may-not-be-new-or-dinosaurs/
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zeveb
> Scientists typically use the term “genera” as the plural of genus. We’re
> using “genuses” to make the connection between the singular and plural
> clearer to folks who don’t spend a lot of time reading up on taxonomy.
> Please direct all complaints to Merriam-Webster.

That's a terrible cop-out. It's easy enough to type 'genera' (and it's shorter
by one letter than 'genuses'!), and it's the proper word to use. It's obvious
enough from context clews what it means. My goodness, what _do_ they teach in
the schools these days?

~~~
bane
They teach English in most English speaking countries. It's nice to know that
the plural of "octopus" is "octopodes" if we happen to know all the correct
etymology for all the languages that we don't learn but still loan words from
as well as all the pluralization rules for all of those languages.

However, in English, the plural of something can be formed from the singular
form by adding an 's' or an 'es' to the end and thus "octopuses" is completely
fine _and_ has the benefit of being correct for English.

If you don't agree, and that pluralization in English should be etymologically
dependent, quick, what's the correct pluralization for the following words?

\- Kimono \- Kimchee \- Dingo \- Brolga \- Dollar \- Polka \- Hula \- Clock \-
Cosmonaut

should I go on?

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jonnathanson
You're right, but in the fields of biology, paleontology, etc., "genera" is
the commonly used and technically correct pluralization of "genus." (For what
it's worth, I'd make the same argument in strong support of "matrices" over
"matrixes.")

Since this is a term of art, I'd argue it deserves less leniency than, say,
words like "octopus" or "cyclops," for which "octopodes" and "cyclopes" are
necessary only to score smartypants points among likeminded friends, and for
which "octopuses" (but not "octopi!") and "cyclopses" are perfectly correct
and acceptable in English.

~~~
bane
So they definitely acknowledge that, but also are targeting an audience that
probably isn't familiar with the jargon^H^H^H^H^H terms of art of this
specific field.

Audience matters and when writing for a general English speaking audience,
terms of art need to be either explained (boring) or translated. This author
chose translation.

If fivethirtyeight.com was a life sciences blog, then this is definitely
wrong.

I definitely am not on the side of proscribing one perfect kind of English,
there are lots of beautiful variations of the language. But this use (and the
footnote) are completely appropriate given the audience.

~~~
jonnathanson
_" Audience matters and when writing for a general English speaking audience,
terms of art need to be either explained (boring) or translated. This author
chose translation."_

I agree that audience matters, but I'm not sure how using the proper term and
footnoting an explanation would be onerously "boring." Different strokes for
different folks, I suppose.

At the end of the day, I'm not overly bothered by it, one way or the other.
These sorts of things always come down to prescriptivism vs. descriptivism,
and that battle can become a holy war in certain circles. Not so much for me.
Just chiming into an existing thread about the subject.

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marcus_holmes
I'm always amazed that we find even a single second example of a dinosaur.

It seems absurd mathematically. The dinosaurs were around for millions of
years, evolving all that time. Unless there's a good reason to think the
biosphere was less populous or diverse, we have to assume that there were
billions of individual animals alive at any one time, split over millions of
species. The number of species over the whole period has got to be up into the
tens of millions at least.

We discover tens-of-thousands of sizable fossils, total, from that whole
period. It's like a one-in-a-thousand chance that any new fossil discovery
will match an existing species, yet it appears that most do.

I don't get it... anyone want to enlighten me?

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beeboop
If I had to guess, the types of conditions that collect and preserve fossils
well enough for us to discover them are transient in nature (as in, it became
suddenly covered by something like a landslide/water) or very geographically
specific. This means there would be a bias towards whole-skeleton fossils
during very specific time periods or very specific locations, rather than bits
and pieces from thousands of different types all over the place.

Could be totally wrong though.

~~~
marcus_holmes
That makes sense. So we're not seeing a cross-section of the entire dinosaur
era, we're just seeing a cross-section of the dinosaurs caught in the Burgess
Shale, or whatever other specific circumstances caught the other examples.

This would make sense if all the examples of any given species came from the
same site. Is that true?

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mchahn
Haven't they been able to get some dna from dinosaur bones recently? That
would really help. When genotyping first appeared many genus/species had to be
recategorized.

~~~
jghn
DNA would be completely destroyed after less than 7 million years, sadly
Jurassic Park will never happen

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mchahn
I went back and found the article from a few weeks ago. It was less convincing
than I remembered. They found a pregnant dinosaur and they think there is new
hope for finding DNA. They haven't actually found any.

[http://news.discovery.com/animals/dinosaurs/pregnant-t-
rex-f...](http://news.discovery.com/animals/dinosaurs/pregnant-t-rex-found-
may-contain-dna-160316.htm)

