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Comment by mellosouls | Hacker News Reader

From the Beeb's report [1]

"I rang up the county council and I said I think I've found a dinosaur," explained Joe Davis, who works at Rutland Water Nature Reserve.

The council said to Mr Davis: "We don't have a dinosaur department at Rutland County Council so we're going to have to get someone to call you back."

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-59915689

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I love this quote, but to be fair it's immediately followed by:

    A team of palaeontologists were brought in for a closer look.

Which, assuming it was done by Rutland County Council, is actually pretty cool.

(Edit: where "it" is the act of bringing the team in from Manchester Uni)

Sometimes small towns get excited about things like this and do a much better job than you might think for a municipality of their size.

If you're ever tragically lost and end up in Shoshone, California (population 31), the tiny one-room town museum is an absolute treasure if you're into dinosaurs. It's been a few years since I was last there, but IIRC, the tiny town museum had to go to court to get its largest dinosaur find back from some big California university that tried to keep it.

See also: The Franklin Mineral Museum in Franklin, New Jersey. An amazing place for rockhounds. Especially if you're into ones that glow.

These austerity measures have just gone too far!

Yes, Rutland is the smallest county, I expect they'd have to ask for help from the Leicestershire or Cambridgeshire dinosaur departments

Extremely boring fact check: Rutland is not "the UK's smallest county" - it is England's smallest county, once again English organisations find it hard to tell the difference between England and the UK.

Clackmannanshire (159 km2) is significantly smaller than Rutland (382 km2).

Rutland is not even England's smallest county [1], it's the fourth according to definitions laid out in the Lieutenancies Act of 1997 [2]. I guess the copy editor kiboshed "Britain’s largest ‘Sea Dragon’ discovered in England’s fourth smallest county".

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceremonial_counties_of_England...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lieutenancies_Act_1997

It's the smallest 'historic county' (i.e. per Domesday book, I believe), that's probably where they got it from.

It's also not the smallest unitary authority (which I'd argue is a more usual layman's meaning of 'county' than 'ceremonial county for the purposes of the lieutenancies act' - who on the street means to include the City of London when they say 'county' for example?) - beaten by Bristol and the IoW.

This is the most English thread I’ve read all year.

Hmn that is an interesting point, maybe then the "City of London" is the UK's smallest county?

It is, however, the least populous.

> once again English organisations find it hard to tell the difference between England and the UK.

If you think that's difficult for English organisations, you should see what the rest of the world thinks. I'm proud to treat "England" and "the United Kingdom" as synonyms. It's like referring to the Soviet Union as "Russia".

Only English (Welsh / Scottish / Irish) organisations would have any interest in distinguishing between England and "the United Kingdom". Who's more likely to distinguish between New York and Texas: the Guardian or the New York Times?

Possibly The Guardian given the View from 9th Avenue's implications for New York geographers. (-:

* https://saulsteinbergfoundation.org/essay/view-of-the-world-...

New York is not a subset of Texas. Distinguishing between the two of like distinguishing between Wales and Scotland, something I think most people can do. Distinguishing between New York City and New York state on the other hand is much closer to distinguishing between Britain, UK, England

> Rutland is not "the UK's smallest county"

Who are you quoting?

The headline, both on HN and the source article.

I did pause, tempted to change the headline, but decided to leave it for mods if desired. Not because I was fact-checking though - I just think it's irrelevant and uninteresting!

It's so small that they haven't even been able to afford their own TV channel for many years, let alone a paleontology department, so can be excused for not knowing that ichthyosaurs weren't dinosaurs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rutland_Weekend_Television

I like that dry and sometimes dark humor part of the british culture very much.

Because, despite the long discussion thread here, the relative size ranking of Rutland County Council doesn't matter here. The wry observation would have happened in other counties too. Pretty much no English county council has a dinosaur department, or a palaeontology department come to that. Calling in the boffins from a university/museum, that does, would be the response pretty much everywhere.

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