Literary "Out-Takes"
Whoops ... got it wrong. Call me a pedant if you like (if that’s the worst I ever
get called, etc.) but it can spoil the credibility of a good book when the author steps
outside of what they really know and say something either dumb or wildly inaccurate. Such
as ...
- From The Kingdom by the Sea
by Paul Theroux, p. 345: "... a rock
collector. He was hacking amber-coloured tubes out of the chalk slabs on the
shore. ‘Belamites, [sic]’ he called them. ‘Take that one,’ he said. ‘Now that
one is between five and eight million years old.’" It seems that natural
history isn’t Theroux’s bag. Without knowing exactly where this
encounter occurred, or seeing the fossils themselves, I cannot say how old
they really were. But, assuming they were correctly identified as belemnites,
which became extinct at least 50 million years ago during the Eocene Epoch,
the beasties his aquaintance was collecting are an order of magnitude older than Theroux reports.
- From What the Traveller Saw
by Eric Newby, pp. 162-3: "... a strange
seed-bearing plant called a cycad ... which has its origins in the Mesozoic period,
2,000,000 years ago." D’oh! Sorry, Eric, but the Mesozoic (which is an era, not
a period) finished 65 million years ago. Any kid will tell you that.
- From In a Sunburned Country
by Bill Bryson, p. 221: "Bryson reports the
discovery of Idiospermum australiense: “What was unexpected about this was
that Idiospermum was thought to have vanished from the earth 100 million years ago.
In fact, it was doing very well in the Daintree, as were eleven other members of its
family, a primitive outpost of botany called the angiosperms, from which all flowering
plants are descended.” In fact, Bryson does pretty well with his facts in this book,
but I think that should read “a primitive outpost of botany within the
angiosperms” (read more).
But it is not only the non-naturalist travel writers who make the occasional howler:
- From Evolutionary Catastrophes
by Vincent Courtillot, p. 4: "[Some geologists,] among them the French, also speak of
the Primary, Secondary and Tertiary Eras. ... We'll use the two sets of terms
interchangeably, particularly 'Cenozoic' and 'Tertiary.'" Ouch!
- From Endless
Forms Most Beautiful
by Sean Carroll, p. 140: There are four errors on this page.
The first two are contained in the sentence "Late in the Precambrian,
about 600 to 570 million years ago, the size and shape of life began to
expand and various centimeter-size forms appear in the so-called
Ediacaran fauna (named for the hills in South Australia where
representatives of these forms were first found)." (1) Although many of
the small Ediacarans are indeed centimeter-size, the single most
remarkable and perhaps most enigmatic characteristic of these animals,
or whatever they are, is that many of them grew to a metre or more; to
characterise this entire fauna as, essentially, small, is to
misrepresent it to the point of error. (2) Ediacaran fossils
were first described from the Fermeuse Formation on the Avalon
Peninsula by E. Billings in 1872. A second assemblage was described
from Namibia, around sixty years later, by G. Gürich
in 1933. It was not until March 1946 that Reginald Sprigg
made the discovery in the Ediacara Hills of South Australia, which
eventually lent its name to the characteristic assemblage. Two more
inaccuracies occur in the caption to figure 6.1, where (3) Dickinsonia costata is erroneously
listed as Dickinsonia costatala, and (4) Spriggina flindersii is erroneously listed as Spriggina flounders
.
Trivia >> Literary "Out-Takes"