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Comment by chx | Hacker News Reader

Side note: "scientists claim" (and Twitter is now full of "fact-checkers say").

Well, gee, I thought the ravings of crazy uncle Bob made it to BBC! Of course scientists claim. To quote George Carlin:

> News people like to say “police have responded to an emergency situation.” No they haven’t, they’ve responded to an emergency. We know it’s a situation.

This can't even be explained by the erosion of truth in recent years because, hell, even Andrew Wakefield was a senior lecturer, I daresay a scientist.

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Scientists can hypothesize, they can speculate, they can opine; they can say a lot more things than claims.

But if you've read the article, it's apparent why, in this instance, these paleontologists would be claiming that these specimens lived thru the dinosaur extinction event as opposed to a more restrained verb.

It is more of a question whether a news source should report about the finding at this stage, or the "scientists <confirm/deny> with high degree of certainty that" step.

It's basically an adverisement for an upcoming TV show. Popular science needs to be accessible and entertaining, which is generally at odds with the cold hard facts. New Scientist often has me eye-rolling in this regard.

It's not like some scientist wannabes made up some stuff to be on BBC. They really found some evidence and started saying meaningful things.

What does that George Carlin quote even mean? Having trouble parsing it.

The bit that quote is from is about how people (particularly media reporters) use unnecessary filler words to dress up and dramatize what should be a simple statement.

I guess OP is saying that the BBC would obviously not be publishing the speculation of an unqualified layman, so the "scientists claim" is unnecessary. But doesn't seem to be to be the same thing Carlin was critiquing.

The research hasn’t yet been published in academic journals, or peer-reviewed. I believe that why that specific language was used.

Nonetheless I find these new discoveries fascinating.

The fossil site was a huge find that made a lot of news a couple years ago. There was a PNAS article about it, though it didn't discuss these particular specimens: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1817407116

Since the scientists didn’t really see it happening, I would add “without evidence” to the title.

The article explains some of the evidence, and their academic papers explain more.

Of course there is evidence. But today's journalists like to reject the evidence and add the 'Without evidence' catchphrase. I chose to not add "/s".

Maybe they should add “without evidence” to the title simply because temp8964 did not see it happen, and anything less is heresay.

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