Superb Accuracy

A sentence in a CNN.com story today showed the kind of scientific accuracy we used to laugh about back in grad school. The story was cutely titled, "Hair may solve mammoth mystery." It was about efforts to learn more about extinct mammoths from sequencing the DNA of their hair. Lead researcher Stephan C. Schuster, of Penn State University, had this to say about it:

"It is important to understand the genetic makeup of an organism before it went extinct."

You see, once a species becomes extinct, it ceases to die and leave fossils. The only fossils we have of a species are the ones left by animals before extinction or on the very edge of it. Ergo, it is best to obtain samples of that nature, rather than wasting time going around looking for post-extinction fossils, which form a null set.

As always, I wish to remind my readers that if I write a sentence such as these, it was intentional.

[Above right: The finest mammoth DNA always comes from animals such as depicted here, as had once existed. Never settle for anything less.]