Shiny new promises have quickly lost their glossy veneer

SO read the second best headline of the past year which appeared over a picture of a brown blob found on a Nevada cave wall and which kind of, sort of, looked a little bit like the outline of a creature from Jurassic Park if you squinted it at in the right way.

The newspaper in question had superimposed a picture of a proper dinosaur next to the blob to reinforce the legitimacy of the suggestion in the reader’s mind, and the headline then began to ramp up the excitement further, holding out the dazzling prospect of a dramatic break from all that we had previously known — then it killed all that mounting anticipation stone dead with the “...or is it just a mud stain” reality-check pay off.

Damn you, over-hyped newspaper presentation, there I was rushed along in the moment and almost ready to discard my belief in Darwinian rationality and believe the blob really could be the depiction of a happy dinosaur/human interaction — and so laugh in the face of so-called science — and then you put the idea back in my head that it might just be a mud stain after all.