Fox News Kills Off The Dinosaurs Before They Existed
Reported by Ellen - January 9, 2010 -
Does Fox News' "zero tolerance for on-screen errors" also pertain to articles on FoxNews.com? If so, somebody's head ought to be on the chopping block for a recent article on FoxNews.com, marked as "updated" on January 7, 2010, which asserts that a volcanic eruption "killed more than 70 percent of plants and dinosaurs walking the planet 250 million years ago." The problem? Fox News made the dinosaurs extinct before they had actually evolved. Fox also suggested that the same volcano erupted coal.
The FoxNews.com article begins:
The tremendous volcanic eruption thought to be responsible for Earth's largest mass extinction — which killed more than 70 percent of plants and dinosaurs walking the planet 250 million years ago — is still taking lives today.Scientists investigating the high incidence of lung cancer in China's Xuan Wei County in Yunnan Province conclude that the problem lies with the coal residents use to heat their homes. That coal was formed by the same 250-million-year-old giant volcanic eruption — termed a supervolcano — that was responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs. The high silica content of that coal is interacting with volatile organic matter in the soil to cause the unusually high rates of lung cancer.
In addition to pointing out that there were no dinosaurs walking the earth at the time, the Highly Allocthonous blog notes that Fox is making the ludicrous suggestion that coal erupted from the volcano.
H/T Haggis Farmer.
