|
By Tim Friend, USA TODAY 10/03/00- Updated 04:06 PM ET
A study on the first discovery of a fossilized dinosaur heart, widely reported last spring in newspapers and on television, is under attack over the heart's true identity and a scientific journal's acceptance of the disputed fossil evidence.
Critics are charging that the study published in Science did not meet standards normally applied to scientific manuscripts, that the heart is most likely fossilized mud and that the study was published more for its sensational appeal than its academic merit.
Some of the critics also charge that the study was given a less rigorous review than normal before its publication because it supports a theory held by a majority of dinosaur paleontologists: that birds descended from dinosaurs.
Science won't disclose details of the confidential review process, but journal officials vehemently deny the accusations. They insist the study was handled properly and question the critics' evidence that the fossil is not a heart.
Science published the study April 21. It said a fossil mass inside the chest cavity of an ornithischian dinosaur was a four-chamber heart. The study, led by Paul Fisher and Dale Russell of North Carolina State University in Raleigh, claimed to provide key evidence that dinosaurs were warmblooded animals and hence the ancestors of birds. A minority of scientists argue that dinosaurs were coldblooded reptiles and that birds evolved separately.
Fisher and Russell based their conclusions on computed tomography (CT) scans of the fossil mass, which they interpreted as a four-chamber heart, characteristic of warmblooded animals. The paper describes the scans and discusses differences in physiology of warmblooded animals and reptiles.
The critics, who include Larry Martin of the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Paul Sereno of the University of Chicago, Tim Rowe of the University of Texas at Austin and James Hicks of the University of California, Irvine, argue that the CT scans are ambiguous and that the study contains serious errors regarding reptile physiology. They argue that the study was not properly peer-reviewed by experts familiar with CT scans of fossils and physiology, who would have caught the errors and demanded stronger evidence for the authors' conclusions.
Peer review is the process in which journal editors send scientific manuscripts to outside experts for critiques before publication. The critics contend that Science simply sent the paper to reviewers known to be favorable to the theory that birds evolved from dinosaurs. ''What happened here in the peer review is we wound up with what essentially amounts to a dinosaur clique,'' Martin says.
Martin and the other critics also say the paper was rushed to publication, increasing the potential for errors. Science received the paper from Fisher's team March 9 and accepted it for publication March 27. Publication of scientific papers generally takes more than three months, experts say.
Russell acknowledges that the review was done quickly to coincide with the opening of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh, which had purchased the fossil and planned to use it as one of three centerpieces for public display.
''The director of the museum asked Science to push ahead to coincide with the opening. The turnaround time for the paper was short, and it was close, but they made it,'' Russell says. He says Science did reject the paper once before it was peer-reviewed, but it was accepted for the expedited review after a journal editor's questions were addressed.
When the paper went through peer review, museum spokeswoman Karen Kemp says, ''there were reviews that were both supportive and critical
|
more posts...
