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05/28/2005 Archived Entry: "Ken MacLeod and Jurassic Crocs"

SF author Ken MacLeod, in his days as a science undergrad, figured out that all the textbooks about Metriorhynchus, a Jurassic marine crocodile, were wrong. "The heel-bone is connected to the foot bone, and these bones lived. Because they weren't flattened, you could see the planes where they articulated, like facets. And when I looked again at the other bones, I could see that they were all flatter than they should have been, and they all had lots of tiny cracks, just as if ... just as if ... they'd all been crushed under tons and tons of mud. The Jurassic marine crocodile hadn't had a flat foot after all. It's just that the bones of the standard specimens had all been flattened. [...] And my dissertation passed, and was filed in the vaults of the Zoology Department, where it probably remains. Every picture of Metriorhynchus is still wrong." (Via Cheryl Morgan)

(tags: KenMacLeod, sciencefiction, jurassic, crocodile)