Re: [dinosaur] RETRACTION: Oculudentavis, new smallest known Mesozoic bird in amber from Cretaceous of Myanmar

[Thomas Richard Holtz <tholtz@umd.edu>]

>ÂIt strikes me as a different way of thinking, perhaps stemming from a top-down authoritarian system in which Chinese leaders probably *can* make things disappear.Â

Ummm, no,

This was apparently initiated by the journal Nature, not by the scientists in China nor their bosses.

By the way, the posters on this thread seem to be unaware that retraction does happen, well, not a lot, but not infrequently. It is just that it is mostly in subjects outside the Ânatural historical sciences.

(A previousÂcase, though, was the retraction of a paper on a fossil cheetah:Âhttps://www.pnas.org/content/109/37/15072.1 )

On Fri, Jul 24, 2020 at 10:54 PM Paul P <turtlecroc@yahoo.com> wrote:

On Saturday, July 25, 2020, 01:27:30 AM UTC, Thomas Richard Holtz <tholtz@umd.edu> wrote:

> David wrote:
> >The paper may no longer be available from the journal (I haven't checked if that is so, or if the PDF is still available with a big watermark saying "RETRACTED", which is how at least some journals do their retractions).
>
> For the record, it is the latter (still there, but with notation) at the moment.


This thread has probably run its course (and then some), but this is just so odd. It strikes me as a different way of thinking, perhaps stemming from a top-down authoritarian system in which Chinese leaders probably *can* make things disappear. The authors' own "retraction" statement:

"We, the authors, are retracting this Article to prevent inaccurate information from remaining in the literature..."

is nonsensical--it's *in* the literature at this point, especially if it has been published in hardcopy. All you can do now is publish corrections and such. Nor should Nature be altering the original PDF online. I wonder who reviewed the paper, if anyone.

  Paul P.

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