Scientific American Responds, receives a “Tip of the Hat”

Posted on April 2, 2012 by Troy Britain

I recently reported that Scientific American had posted some misinformation about the extinct equid Hyracotherium (Eohippus) on their website and have since received a short e-mail from Katherine Harmon―author of the slide show which drew my ire―thanking me for catching the mistake and informing me that she had changed the entry.

When I checked it out I found that not only had she removed the inaccurate information about Richard Owen thinking that Hyracotherium had been some sort of hyrax but she put in an asterisk and footnote stating that the correction had been made! So she not only corrected the mistake but owned having made it by noting the correction rather than simply flushing it down the memory hole.

Well done Ms. Harmon; much respect!

Now I have to start seriously thinking about changing the darn Wikipedia entry that caused the confusion in the first place…

Hyracotherium misinformation at scientificamerican.com

Posted on February 27, 2012 by Troy Britain

I am going to give another wag of the finger, this time to Scientific American. They posted a number of paintings of reconstructions of various extinct “horses” in a picture gallery titled “Ancient Miniature Horses”, which includes an entry for the famous “dawn horse”, Hyracotherium.

However, the problems lies not in the painting, which is probably a reasonable guesstimate of what Hyracotherium might have looked like in life but rather with the blurb of information included with the painting:

Hyracotherium This genus of small early horse roamed the early woodlands of Asia, Europe and North America some 55 million to 45 million years ago. It was already larger than Sifrhippus, weighing about 22.7 kilograms. But when Richard Owen first discovered Hyracotherium in 1876, it was so diminutive that he thought it was some unknown hyrax species, a group of extant mammals that live in Africa and the Middle East.

Painting by Heinrich Harder used by S.A.

No, no, no, a thousand times no! It is bad enough when creationists claim that Hyracotherium is merely a hyrax (rather than a ancestral horse) and claim that Richard Owen thought so as well but to have a venerable science publication like Scientific American falling into the same pit of misinformation is extremely vexing.

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