Most people know that we have tried to judge what may happen during global warming by creating gigantic models of the Earth system, and see how it responds to forcing from different factors.

Another way that we approach the problem, is, (in my opinion) a much more interesting line of research, and that is looking in the geological record to see how the Earth responded in the past to global warming events, and to use these to inform us about what may happen now.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. This is true of all science, but especially in palaeontology, where only a handful of exceptional fossils can give a disproportionate amount of weight to a hypothesis. As a consequence, palaeontologists are rightly highly suspicious of exceptional fossils, and thus new finds are, at first, treated with derision and pathological suspicion, until, after much scrutiny, they are found to make the grade.

Never was this more the case than with Archeoraptor. Here was a fossil that had a lot to prove and a long way to fall. But, despite the whinings of Kent Hovind and the like, from the very start, very few people were fooled by Archeoraptor, and the whole debacle barely registered within the scientific community.

Dear BBC,

Before publishing an article like this...



...would you take a step back and think, "Is this really what my facts are telling me?" Because, if they don't, consider your position as a self-styled centre for top quality journalism, and don't publish misleading, irresponsible things like this.

And please, don't adopt the Daily mail tactic of putting a caveat halfway down the page. Or in this case, literally in the second paragraph,