[no subject]

[chris brochu <cbrochu@blue.weeg.uiowa.edu>]

I would also like to reinforce what Tom H., John H., and others have 
said regarding the use of web-based references.

A couple of years ago, I got a call from a woman about her daughter's 
homework assignment.  Her daughter (2nd grade, if I recall correctly) 
was in a class in which the teacher assigned each student a different 
extinct animal and then asked for presentations of a given length (I 
no longer remember how long).  Her daughter's assigned animal was 
Deinosuchus.

(Interestingly, she did not call for me specifically - she simply 
called the Field Museum and asked for a paleontologist.  No one at 
the Museum's switchboard knew I had ever looked at any crocodyliform, 
much less Deinosuchus.  This was simply a stroke of luck  for her.)

Anyway, she was having difficulty finding published information on 
Deinosuchus.  I was not surprised (and  said so), as there is very 
little we can actually say about Deinosuchus - it was big, it is 
typically found in estuarine or coastal deposits, it's known only 
from the Campanian (maybe lower Maastrichtian) of North America, and 
so on.  I honestly didn't think it was an appropriate choice for a 
second-grader, and eventually advised her to ask her daughter's 
teacher for a different animal for her daughter.

What horrified me was the "information" she had pulled off the web 
for her daughter.

Her:  "I mean, we DO know, from the web, that Deinosuchus' jaws were 
unfused in the middle so they could stretch their mouths like 
snakes..."

Me:  "WHAT?!?!"

Her:  "You mean they can't?"

Me:  "Absolutely not.  Most croc jaws are unfused at the middle [the 
symphysis]. but there isn't any mediolateral movement there."

Her:   "Oh."  (short pause)  "But it IS true, isn't it, that they 
only ate dinosaurs?"

Me:  "We've never found gut contents (at least none that I would 
accept), so for all we know, they independently evolved chloroplasts 
and photosynthesized."

and so on.


Moral of the story - the web can be a valuable tool, but unless you 
know who is providing the information, it shouldn't be used instead 
of a well-stocked library.