Ben Goldacre continues to complain about the poor quality of science journalism in the UK, despite government assurances to the contrary. I’d like to offer a brief observation in the same vein.

This article in today’s Independent suggests from the first couple of paragraphs, that we might soon learn the answer to every dinosaur-mad kid’s must urgent question: what color were they? There you are, with your brand new coloring book full of exciting pictures of T-Rex battling with Triceratops and the like, but you have no idea which crayon to use. Is science coming to the rescue?

Well not quite. There is a warning in paragraph two where the author, Andrew Johnson, talks about “fossilised feathers and fur”. He is right to do so, of course, because that’s what the technique developed at Yale is all about, which is actually quite amazing. And Johnson is right that some dinosaurs did have feathers. But most of them, especially the ones we are most familiar with, had neither feathers nor fur, so the whole breathless air of the article is just a pretense to get more people reading.

I don’t think I would have minded so much if Johnson had been a dumb tabloid journalist who actually thought that T-Rex did have fur (or feathers). But this is so transparent. It seems like Johnson knows what he is doing isn’t right, but doesn’t care, and doesn’t care who knows that he doesn’t care.