Student’s 3 Minute Thesis highlights media’s dinomania

Student’s 3 Minute Thesis highlights media’s dinomania

Who’s sick of dinosaurs? Ian Randall for one, and he’s even won an award for it.

The University of Auckland PhD student is studying the media’s love affair with these prehistoric animals, and the reporting of palaeontology in general.

He took some of his findings so far, entered them into the University’s Three Minute Thesis competition, and won.

Now he’s heading to the 2015 Trans-Tasman 3 Minute Thesis competition being held at the University of Queensland in Brisbane on 2 October.

The competition is an ‘elevator pitch’ type of contest. Doctoral candidates have three minutes and one power point slide to explain their work to a general audience.

Ian’s passionate three minutes challenged the media’s ‘dinomania’, which he calls “an unparalleled fascination with one topic that has the potential to displace other science out of the news.”

He starts his talk with a fascinating perspective from the sort of animal that misses out on the limelight: a sea scorpion (or, as Ian knows them, a ‘eurypterid’) from the oceans of over 250 million years ago.

Sea scorpions were deadly predators, with segmented armour, claws, compound eyes and body sizes ranging up to 2.5 metres in length.

They were one of the first creatures to walk onto the land. According to some theories, they propelled an evolutionary arms race with their prey, shaping the body plans from which modern vertebrates are derived.

In his Three Minute Thesis, Ian invited the audience to imagine how indignant a sea scorpion would be if they discovered how little known their story is in the modern world.

In The New York Times, for example, eurypterids have only featured a couple of times in the last three decades. The same goes for so many other species with relevant and interesting stories to tell, he says.

“Dinosaurs can be great for getting the public interested in palaeontology and science in general,” Ian says, “but they are one small piece of a much larger puzzle.”

“When dinosaurs are appearing in around one in every three news stories on palaeontological research, I feel we have a problem that’s worth investigating.”

While palaeontologists are very aware of the media’s dinomania, he says, science communication researchers seem to give it little thought. Instead, subject-specific studies of science journalism tend to focus on medicine, human biology or climate science.

“I hope my work, as an example, might encourage similar research exploring the quirks of other science journalism beats.”

As an undergraduate, Ian studied Geology at St Edmund Hall, Oxford.

He became interested in scientific journalism and completed a Master of Arts (MA) in Science Journalism at City University London.

He worked in Geneva as an editor at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, before coming to New Zealand in 2012.

Ian is completing his PhD in Media, Film and Television under the supervision of Dr Sue Abel, and he is also being supervised by Prof. Kathy Campbell from the Faculty of Science.

He hopes to finish his PhD in 2016.

ENDS

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