So the headline clearly says "fossil". the word "fossil" comes up in the article.
>> Dating of the sediments around the remains suggests it lived about 39 million years ago.
ok, so clearly then "not original organic material".
But then,
>> "Each vertebra weighs over 100kg, which is just completely mind-blowing," said co-worker Dr Rebecca Bennion from the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels.
If I'm charitable I'm reading this as "The vertebra, when they were made of bone, weigh over 100kg..." ? I mean now that they are _fossils_ (ie ROCK) well, 100kg of rock doesn't really tell me a whole lot.
>> "It took several men to shift them out into the middle of the floor in the museum for me to do some 3D scanning.
Which makes me think she's talking about the _fossil_ weight. So, implying "they're big fossils"? Not that the bones used to weight this much...
then
>> The team that drilled into the centre of some of these vertebrae to work out the bone density - the bone was so dense, it broke the drill on the first attempt."
So either it's a fossil (aka ROCK) or it's bone. It (apparently?) can't be both.[1] Given that it's rock, drilling into it and breaking the drill bit just tells me it's hard rock.
There's more in the article seemingly mixing the term "bones" and "fossils" ("The bones are going on display in Lima to celebrate their description in a scientific journal")
I get that this is a "popular science" type article, but is it too much to ask that it use the right words?
Actually the text from your National Geographic link is the one that is more sloppy.
The original meaning of the word "fossil", which is still used in various contexts, means anything that is dug up from below the surface of the Earth.
During the last two centuries "fossil" became used more frequently with the restricted meaning of remains of ancient living beings.
"Fossilization" is any process that has ensured the preservation of such remains. The most frequent form of fossilization is mineralization, which is the transformation of the remains into a rock, but it is not the only kind of fossilization, especially for more recent remains, like fossil amber or the fossils from the La Brea Tar Pits. Some organic molecules have survived even billions of years without being converted into rocks.
Your quotation "to become a fossil, the bone has to become rock" is valid only in the most frequent cases, because sometimes a bone becomes a fossil without becoming a rock, e.g. when the animal has been enbalmed (e.g. by tar or resin) or frozen (like many mammoths).
You are right however that the article discussed here is annoyingly ambiguous, because it cannot be known whether the hardness and weight are attributes of the original bones or only of the mineralized bones that have been preserved.
In any case, the conclusions about the weight of the bones in the living animal were based on studies of the microscopic structure of the bones, not on how many people were needed to carry the fossils.
To add another counter-example, "fossil air" is "A sample of air (for example in the bubbles trapped in an ice core) that preserves the composition of the environment at the time it was deposited." - https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority...
BBC Science coverage has been getting worse for about 30 years and is now little more than either tech advertisement (yay! gadgets!)or pulp science / clickbait.
Still seems magical to me that the largest animals ever to live on this planet are alive today (or maybe 200 years ago would have been a better time to be a whale, before hunting too many of their largest).
Interesting that this creature isn't actually larger, but could be heavier due to its bone structure.
A small caveat. Largest that we know of. Most animals don't make good fossils, it's actually rare for an animal to get in the right spot at the right time to fossilize, and then we have to find it. Which effectively mean that it has to be on land, preferably empty area, close to surface.
This effectively means that we mostly get fossils from species that very relatively abundant, lived in what is today North America, Australia, Europe, China or more recently, richer parts of South America. Because finding fossils without funding is difficult.
Well, we don't just base the hypothesis that blue whales are the largest animal even on their size relative to estimated size of extinct species in general. It's based on the phylogeny of quite a few extinct and extant whale species and other allometric and paleo-bio/ecological considerations that go into a model of a recent diversification of larger whales that has thus far culminated in the blue whale [1]. It doesn't appear individual species of whale were evolving gigantism really rapidly and out of nowhere from smaller species, but a gradual trend over tens of millions of years. It appears missing fossils that are extreme size outliers probably become less likely the further you go back in time from the past few million years.
> Because finding fossils without funding is difficult
Eh, not really. They don't occur in isolation typically, a formation/deposit or Lagerstätten [2] rich in fossils are accidentally discovered, word gets out at some point, and then international funding follows.
IIRC the blue whale is larger than all possible (reasonable) land animals, so the only possible competition would be another ocean animal of some sort.
Yeah, it's mind blowing. Minor correction, however. It's indeed the weight that counts usually. When we say blue whales are the largest, we mean heaviest. Largest in terms of size would probably be the Argeninosaurs or some other sauropods.
Probably, yep. Longer individual animal alive is a marine invertebrate arranged as a fine thread, If I remember correctly. But trees can easily triple that size, of course.
"near"? Wouldn't "nearly" be more grammatically correct.
"but that was before commercial whaling"? Wouldn't a more professional way of writing this be "until the advent of commercial whaling"
This all sounds like a speech of a tour guide being made towards children not a scientific article in the BBC.
Speaking of tour guide, the section bringing in the Natural History Museum was wild to me. Yes, the museum's whale skeleton is a beautiful sight for visitors to see, but "The London whale skeleton is a key resource for scientists worldwide" -> huh?? Blue Whales are far from extinct, why would scientists need to go to this one museum for skeletons, surely they can be found from other sources?
But really, I was on guard from the very beginning of the article that started with FIVE consecutive paragraphs made up of single sentences. What strange paragraph breaks, why not combine them into 2 or 3 max?
The articles is a news article - think science popularisation. It's not a scientific article, but from my (British-English-speaking) perspective, the tone is reasonable and professional.
You didn't include in your quote that the skeleton was digitised to help prepare for it's move to the main hall of the museum. I think that the article emphasises that the analysis and digital artefacts created while moving the skeleton are an important scientific resource. That sounds credible to me.
>> Dating of the sediments around the remains suggests it lived about 39 million years ago.
ok, so clearly then "not original organic material".
But then, >> "Each vertebra weighs over 100kg, which is just completely mind-blowing," said co-worker Dr Rebecca Bennion from the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels.
If I'm charitable I'm reading this as "The vertebra, when they were made of bone, weigh over 100kg..." ? I mean now that they are _fossils_ (ie ROCK) well, 100kg of rock doesn't really tell me a whole lot.
>> "It took several men to shift them out into the middle of the floor in the museum for me to do some 3D scanning.
Which makes me think she's talking about the _fossil_ weight. So, implying "they're big fossils"? Not that the bones used to weight this much...
then
>> The team that drilled into the centre of some of these vertebrae to work out the bone density - the bone was so dense, it broke the drill on the first attempt."
So either it's a fossil (aka ROCK) or it's bone. It (apparently?) can't be both.[1] Given that it's rock, drilling into it and breaking the drill bit just tells me it's hard rock.
There's more in the article seemingly mixing the term "bones" and "fossils" ("The bones are going on display in Lima to celebrate their description in a scientific journal")
I get that this is a "popular science" type article, but is it too much to ask that it use the right words?
[1] I checked online, and apparently; "But a buried bone isn't the same thing as a fossil -- to become a fossil, the bone has to become rock. " https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/earth/geolog....
"Fossils are not the remains of the organism itself! They are rocks." https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/fossil/