Well, I had never heard of Ford (not a dinosaur guy), so I had to look this up. I found Ford's original 'research' - it was
The creationist above refers to a book, so Ford probably took the standard creationist route of whining in book form when the "orthodoxy" did not bow down to his greatness.
Which was not all that great. I also found
- which I reproduce much of below - and one will note that the rebuttal provides citations, whereas Ford's original essay had none. Turns out Ford appears to be a Shapiro-style egotist upset that he did not become a star based on his inaccurate claims.
No wonder creationists like his story - while he is not a creationist, he acts just like them.
As readers interested in dinosaurs will know, Ford made something of a name for himself in the world of vertebrate palaeontology back in 2012 by announcing that palaeontologists have gotten dinosaurs
completely wrong. Non-bird Mesozoic dinosaurs were, so says Ford, perpetually aquatic animals that actually sloshed around, shoulder-deep, in the water and were completely unsuited for life on land: the mainstream palaeontological view that these animals were strongly adapted for terrestrial life is, so he says, misguided and woefully wrong.
Ford published an article announcing his infallible hypothesis in science newszine
Laboratory News (Ford 2012). Aided and abetted by an inciteful media, his idea received gargantuan coverage in the global press. Instinct told me to ignore the whole circus – in any case, colleagues were already doing a good job of saying what nonsense it was. Alas, I was specifically invited to produce a response and eventually decided, as a damage-limitation exercise, to do so (
Naish 2012).
[...]
Needless to say, all of these claims are erroneous and easy to contradict based on the data we have. I’d like to hope that this was all obvious to the people in the audience, but sadly it’s human nature to assume that a person who speaks with authority on an unfamiliar topic is reliable and likely correct, so don’t get your hopes up.
[...]
Sauropods, no matter what Ford may like to tell us, are built like long-tailed, long-necked elephants. They mostly have deep bodies, slender limbs and proportionally small, compact hands and feet – precisely the opposite of what we’d see if they were built for routine life in the water. Those of you who know the dinosaur literature will be aware of the fact that the precise same arguments were used long ago to dispel the erroneous 20thcentury view that sauropods were perpetual swamp-dwellers (Bakker 1971, Coombs 1975): those arguments have been widely accepted by palaeontologists because they appear to be valid, not because (contra Ford) palaeontologists are dogmatically adhering to a status quo because they’re worried about losing research funding or whatever. [*NOTE - that fear of losing funding thing is a classic creationist trope!*]
[...]
Then there’s the extensive skeletal and soft-tissue pneumatisation we know that sauropods had. Ford ignores this, doesn’t mention it and might even (for all I know) be wholly unaware of it, but it’s been shown that sauropods were
so air-filled (the bones of some species being up to 89% air) that – if and when they did swim – they must have floated high in the water and been prone to tipping (Henderson 2003). Again, their anatomy shows that they were not suited for a life in water, contra Ford. The extensive tooth wear we see in sauropods is also indicative of a terrestrial life that involved the stripping and biting of foliage belonging to ferns, conifers and so on.
[...]
Within recent years evidence has gradually come together indicating that
Spinosaurus – a long-snouted, sail-backed giant theropod from the Upper Cretaceous of northern Africa – was adapted for a life at the water’s edge, and the newest data shows that it has strongly reduced medullary cavities in its long bones, proportionally short hindlimbs, a spreading, functionally four-toed, probably fully webbed foot, and other specialisations for an amphibious or even fully aquatic life (Ibrahim
et al. 2014). Ford takes this as support for his primary contention, but he’s cheating.
Firstly, the idea that
Spinosaurus might be aquatic isn’t an idea that the community has been contesting, nor was Ford the first to invent it. Au contraire: as more and more data has come in, we’ve seen
Spinosaurus make the metaphorical transition from an animal that waded at the water’s edge (Taquet 1984) to one that routinely swam (Amiot
et al. 2010) to one that was predominantly aquatic (Ibrahim
et al. 2014). We’ve made this transition on the basis of the accruing of evidence – you know, the sort of thing that scientists are supposed to do. Does what we think about
Spinosaurus apply to other big theropods, or to other big dinosaurs, as Ford insists? No. The aquatic features of
Spinosaurus are (so far as we know at the moment) unique to
Spinosaurus, making it wrong for Ford to point to this one taxon and say “I told you so!”.
[...]
Ford’s contention about the alleged aquatic habits of dinosaurs makes a good story. It makes for an entertaining talk, and it's a fun topic of the sort that journalists love to write about. Why? Predominantly because Ford can be portrayed as the lone truther battling against a barbarian swarm of opposition. We
love stories like this. And a big part of the Ford lecture that I listened to wasn’t about dinosaurs themselves, or about science, but about the ‘community reaction’ to his idea, about the fact that angry palaeontologists and palaeontological writers reacted with abject hostility to his idea (he referred to
Brian Switek’s article on a few occasions).
In fact, Ford specifically said that he was surprised at the venomosity and aggression contained in these responses. They clearly prove, so he said, the existence of a blinkered and biased approach in the mainstream palaeontological community, a vested commitment in the textbook dogma that museum displays, research careers and those ubiquitous and easy-to-obtain financial grants are all so dependent on. Such is the appeal of this lone truther concept that – so Ford told us – a book and even a Hollywood movie (all movies are made in Hollywood, right?) are perhaps going to result. Oh
puh-leez, pass the sick bucket.
And so on...
Creationists like Ford's story because, intellectually/egotistically, they are kindred spirits.
