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Re: raptor

Well,
If their consultants told them to treat raptor as a proper noun, they had better seek better consultants. Same goes for hyphenating scientific names. Or possibly they sort of shopped around until they found a consultant who gave them the answers they liked---who knows?
The bottom line is that popular media must make a profit, and sensationalism and shortcuts often seem to take precedence over scientific accuracy. At least that has been my experience, but I am rather cynical. There are obviously exceptions, but they seem to be just that and not the rule. And I certainly would not have used the phrase "in your backyard", because it can obviously result in a lot of misinterpretation and confusion. But the quality of their work, or lack thereof seemed most noticeable (in what little of it I saw) in describing Tyrannosaurus' paleoenvironment as "Where there were lots of prey." Give me a break.
--------Ken
********************************************************* 
From: Dinosaur Interplanetary Gazette <dinosaur@dinosaur.org>
Reply-To: dinosaur@dinosaur.org
To: kinman@hotmail.com
CC: dinosaur@usc.edu
Subject: Re: raptor
Date: Sat, 23 Jun 2001 20:02:03 -0400

An interesting response...

Discovery Channel spells it "Raptor" and claims that their paleo consultants
approve of that.

This seems to me something like the prevalence of  "T-rex" in book titles
because publishers claim that it's easier to read that "T. rex"



Ken Kinman wrote:

> I would definitely not spell raptor with a capital "R" in the middle of
> sentence as though it was a formal taxon. Even avian raptors would form a
> polyphyletic taxon, since the owls are not closely related to (i.e., in an
> exclusive clade with) hawks or other raptors.--

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