I am a butt sometimes...

 I was a total jerk today.  There is a paleontology reporting youtube channel that I actually like a lot.  But I went off on the episode because of certain things said, and they were NOT the fault of the reporter, he was simply going of published papers.

But the part that bugs me is this new trend using statistical analysis to place finds into various clades.  Yes, cladistics.  The trend is to identify measurement points on fossil bones, compile them into this massive database, and run a program to try and sort out how these bones might be related to some other bones.  It really CAN'T take into account the sparse number of fossils, the massive amounts of time, and the chance that over 10s of millions of years animals can "evolve" to be so similar that even their skeletons are nearly identical.

Anyway, google BEN G THOMAS and go to his site and watch his videos, they are good.  Not quite as good as Raptor Chatter's but... better than most.

Dinosaurs are fun.  They were amazing creatures.  It is fun to imagine how they might have behaved.  But we can never actually KNOW things about them, because all we ever get are minute snapshots of a moment in time over 100s of millions of years.  We find a clutch of eggs and assume "oh the parents must have cared for the babies" or "younger predators were faster and more agile than adults so they MUST have hunted in packs, the juveniles driving prey right into the mouths of the adults!"  BZZZZZZT!  Dinosaurs MIGHT have packed around but it was highly unlikely to be a complex behavior like group hunting.  As proof scientists will haul out a fossil site where 20 of the same species died.  Turns out it could have been a million other things other than cooperative packing... it could have been desperation for water, or prey, or even a natural trap of some sort.  We simply can't know these things.

That's why it is FUN to imagine, but don't let imagination drive science.  That came off wrong.  You can use imagination to drive your interest in science, but don't use it to verify facts.