Dog walker discovers 65 million-year-old fossil after pets sniff it out
What, you may ask, is stupid about that?
Well, the fossil in question is an ichthyosaur. If the headline was true, this would be a really exciting find, since current understanding is that ichthyosaurs went extinct much earlier. It would extend the ichthyosaur fossil record by some 25 million years.
Of course, it's not true. The fact that it's not true is evident even from within the very brief article. The fossil in question dates to the Jurassic period (201-145 million years ago).
How then, did the 'journalist' come to the conclusion that the fossil was 65 million years old? He seems to have got that from a quote attributed to the guy who first stumbled across this remarkably preserved fossil. He informed journalists how exciting the experience was, to find something that 'has been there for at least 65 million years.'
So, random member of the public knows, off the top of his head, that ichthyosaurs have been extinct at least as long as dinosaurs, and thus his fossil must be older. A journalist somehow confuses this
terminus ante quem based on common everyday knowledge for an age estimate and ran with it. This despite the fact that the pitiful excuse for research that went into the article had already provided them with enough information to know the fossil is about 100 million years older had they thought to, say, look up the word 'Jurassic' in Wikipedia.
What's concerning, is not just that one journalist is shit at his job and that his editors are shit at theirs (original source was the Daily Mail, after all), but that of the 7 'news sources' that simply copied the Daily Mail's story, only one put enough thought into their rewrite to remove this basic, glaring error. The other 6 all blithely inform us that it's a 65-million year old Jurassic fossil.