Cracked needs to stop making paleontology-related articles.

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Hi all. Today, I need to rant about Cracked.com for a bit. Specifically, I need to tell the writers at Cracked to stop making paleontology-related articles.

Here is a paleontology-related article that Cracked made somewhat recently.

http://www.cracked.com/article_25623_meet-worldE28099s-dumbest-looking-shark.html

First of all, they claim that Helicoprion was a shark. In reality, the closest living relatives of Helicoprion are chimaeras.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimaera

Second, the article uses an outdated reconstruction of Helicoprion and then calls it "dumb". This is a more modern restoration of the creature.
VVV


See? Not that dumb.

Has Cracked always been like this? Well … yes. Here is another Cracked article that was originally written in 2008, but is moved back up to the front page every so often as a sort of "re-run".

http://www.cracked.com/article_16117_6-formerly-kickass-creatures-ruined-by-evolution.html

There is so much wrong with this article. I could make a list of everything that is wrong with it.

1. The opening paragraph claims that chickens are descendants of Tyrannosaurus rex. In reality, Tyrannosaurus rex has no living descendants. Tyrannosaurus rex perished in the K-T disaster, leaving no descendants. Modern birds are descendants of dinosaurs that were far more birdlike. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraves

2. The "rex" in Tyrannosaurus rex should not be capitalized.

3. Hyaenodon was not an ancestor of racoons. It also has no descendants. Ancestral racoons have never been very large. Racoons are descendants of earlier, smaller mammals.

4. Gastornis was not an ancestor of Kiwis. Also, more recent scientific research has revealed that Gastornis was herbivorous.

5. Struthioniformes does not contain kiwis or rheas. The only extant representatives of this clade are ostriches. Gastornis was not ancestral to them either.

6. Smilodon was not ancestral to marsupials. I have no idea where they got that "information", because it's completely wrong.

7. Megatherium was another evolutionary offshoot that left no descendants. To be fair, the ancestors of modern sloths may have been larger … but not as large as Megatherium. Noticing a pattern? Very large animals rarely survive long, as they are highly vulnerable to environmental changes. The vast majority of prehistoric giants have no living descendants … and the giant animals that exist today may not survive much longer either. Have you ever noticed that most giant animals alive today are endangered? They are having difficulty coping with human-caused environmental changes. That's why.

8. Entelodon was not ancestral to pigs. It was closer to whales and hippos than it was to pigs.

9. Andrewsarchus was not ancestral to goats. It has no descendants, and its closest living relatives are whales and hippos.

This article probably has more problems, but I won't bother to address them. I don't want to read any more of that crappy article.

I know what some of you are thinking. "Chill out dude. Cracked is a humor site. It doesn't take itself seriously."

Bollocks. Cracked is a humor site in name only. Anyone who uses Cracked on a day-to-day basis knows that the site is full of dead serious articles about how evil white males are. I have no idea why Cracked still calls itself a humor site. At this point, Cracked is a identity politics site that takes itself completely seriously. Many internet leftists now use Cracked as a source. In other words, people take this site completely and utterly seriously.

In my opinion, Cracked should pick one of these options.

1. Get some people who actually know what they are talking about to make the paleontology articles.

2. Actually be a humor site for once.

You should leave a comment on their site pointing out their egregious falsehoods.

It sounds like Cracked is as inaccurate as QI, which once claimed all Australian mammals are marsupials (as you know, we have native bats and rodents, which are not marsupials and of course our monotremes aren't marsupials).

Stephen Fry then made a "correction" and said marsupials are not mammals before claiming Australia has no native mammals. WTF!!??

What are "native animals" exactly? How long does an animal have to live on a continent before it can be classified as native?

Dingoes were accidentally brought to Australia by the Australian Aboriginal people. Are they native wildlife?

I some ways, Africa is the only place with any native humans, since humans originated in Africa and later spread throughout the world. Given that so many large mammals were hunted to extinction during this spreading period, it was basically an invasion of an entire planet … but we generally don't consider Aboriginal Australians or white Europeans to be invaders.

I don't know. Have scientists reached a consensus on that question? I'm not sure if there are any pureblood dingos left. Are they native if they carry genes from dogs brought by Europeans?

I think we've had bats in Australia for far longer than we've had dingos but we've had marsupials since Australia was connected to the Americas. As you know bats didn't exist in any part of the world at that time. Maybe the bats island hopped across Indonesia to get here.