#pteresies

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

The sad thing is Peters actually has a really good childrens' book called From the Beginning describing human evolution from protocells to Homo sapiens and talking about the branch points with common ancestors with other species and what we gain or lose at each step. It's accurate (for its time anyway, this was before Ecdyszoa/Lophotrochozoa were known so it follows the whole acoelomate->coelomate->deuterostome story of chordate origins), so it's a shame Peters is better known for crap. D:

I know, right? His illustrations really are lovely. I completely agree.

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

I'm an ignorant English person; could you please enlighten me who David Peters is?

David Peters is an artist who employs fairly faulty methods to analyze pterosaurs and has come up with some pretty... unsupported conclusions about pterosaur anatomy and phylogeny. Sadly, he has blogs on the internet, and pterosaurs aren’t actually that well studied, so his sites are often what first come up when you search for information about pterosaurs, leading to a widespread epidemic of misinformation. 

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

Do you know of a post anywhere that gives a good summary of all the things wrong with david peters? i want to show a friend how terrible it is.

Here is a lovely post by Scientific American: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/tetrapod-zoology/world-must-ignore-reptileevolution-com/

Also, my friends and I have a blog http://pteresies.tumblr.com/ that was sort of dedicated to bashing David Peters, but we never do anything with it