It’s been a good week for ... Scotland
We have our very own Jurassic park on the Isle of Skye.
Giant prehistoric footprints found on the island are shedding new light on a previously little-understood period of dinosaur evolution.
Researchers, including some from Edinburgh University, have been examining dozens of the footprints, which date back 170 million years.
They found that the tracks, left in a muddy lagoon, belonged to sauropods and therapods from the Middle Jurassic period.
Most of the prints were made by long-necked sauropods – which were up to 2m (6.5ft) tall – and by theropods, which were the older cousins of Tyrannosaurus Rex.
The story has been picked up around the world and went viral on social media.
This is great news, but one wonders what this will do to the influx of visitors to an island already groaning with tourists. No doubt more will now emerge to primordially swamp the area.
Talks are probably already ongoing to set up Prehistoric Scotland. Suggestions of a Tourist Tax for Skye may well morph into T-Rex Tax for dinosaur enthusiasts flocking in the footsteps of giants.
I can just picture the holiday coaches boasting Tartanasaurus Tours. Yabba dabba skean dhu!
It’s been a bad week for ... Indonesia
It seems fake news was alive and well way back in 2011.
The perpetrators? None other than the BBC. Aunty has come clean and admitted that a scene in its Human Planet series, which featured a tribe from West Papua, in Indonesia, was not accurate.
In the episode, the Korowai people were shown moving into a treehouse as their home.
But during recent filming for a different programme, the tribe said the houses were "commissioned for filming".
The BBC said it "breached editorial standards" and had since revised its guidelines.
The error was discovered as producers made BBC Two's forthcoming series My Year With The Tribe.
The corporation said a tribe member told presenter Will Millard the very high treehouses were built for "the benefit of overseas programme makers".
In the new programme, Millard tells viewers: "This is not where they live, this is total artifice".
A BBC spokeswoman said: "The BBC has reviewed a sequence in Human Planet depicting this [the treehouses] and found that the portrayal of the tribe moving into the treehouse as a real home is not accurate."
Whatever next? I’m now beginning to have my doubts about the Beeb’s hugely popular Walking With Dinosaurs series. Huh - I bet it turns out it was all CGI.
Best stick to Skye news.
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