Kevin Bian's Media Review

Anonymous 17 September, 2014. Meteor that killed off dinosaurs also helped create changing colors of fall, researchers find. Fox News Latino. 21 September 2014.

Blonder, B., D.L. Royer, K.R. Johnson, I. Miller, B.J. Enquist. 2014. Plant Ecological Strategies Shift Across the Cretaceous–Paleogene Boundary. PLOSBiology. 10.1371/journal.pbio.1001949.

Summary of the news article.

1) Fox News claims that the meteor that hit the Yucatan peninsula 66 million years ago may be responsible for the biodiversity around the world through destroying slow-growing evergreen trees to allow room for “faster-growing evergreen trees.” In the original article, the authors also make the claim that the meteor was responsible for the “selection against slow growing evergreen” trees in favor of other more diverse species. Fox News also claimed that the result came about after studying “1,000 fossilized plant leaves” in North Dakota embedded in the “Hell Creek Formation.” In the original article, the authors also mentioned that the “Floras come from the Hell Creek and Fort Union formations in southwestern North Dakota, United States.”

2) In the papers conclusion, the items that the authors highlighted, namely that “The trends towards higher VD and reduced ranges of LMA reflect large physiological and biological shifts in plant functioning,” is discussed in the article, where they mentioned that the results represented the evidence of a dramatic shift from slow-growing plants to fast-growing plants.

3) The original paper also discusses the uncertainty around their discoveries through the use of correlation between temperatures and vein density/Leaf mass per area, and how they positively or negatively correlate and how that relates to their study. However, in the article they make no mention whatsoever of the uncertainties in their discoveries.

4-6)In the news article, the reporter does not mention broader implications at all, nor do they discuss any alternative hypotheses not mentioned in the original paper. In the technical paper, the authors do not describe any previous contradictory work.

Last modified: 22 September 2014