I retain just enough of my childhood fascination with dinosaurs to be interested in a headline like “A Meat Eater Bigger Than T. Rex Is Unearthed”. Of course, most of the information you would really want is right there in the headline: New dinosaur species, really big, carnivorous, next story please.
Subsequent years of scientific training have given me a second reaction to this sort of story, after “Whoa, cool.” Namely, “Boy, the graphics with this story are useless.” I mean, the little shadow-dinosaur jpeg at left is a standard thing, but the almost completely featureless map of Argentina? What, exactly, am I to glean from that? At least draw some mountains or rivers on it, so I feel like I’m getting some information.
More importantly, how about a picture? OK, fine, the nice people at the Museum of Natural History haven’t gotten around to reconstructing the skeleton so it looks cool, but surely somebody took pictures of the bones. Why not put one with the online article? Or the classic “guy-in-a-pith-helmet-standing-in-a-hole” shot? I realize that the cost of ink means you can’t have photos with every story in the physical paper, but why should that doom us to image-free blandness on the Web?
How to Keep Dinosaurs will need to be updated.
National Geographic has a photo of the reconstructed skull