I don't much care for dinosaurs, but the media love them. Since the media are always wise and right and tell us what we need to know and not what they think we should know, we need to recognize this, and help them. Given their difficulties with geological time, therefore, I propose changing the current time scale to make it much more media-friendly.
Rather than having those pesky Palaeozoic, Mesozoic and Cainozoic eras, and further subdividing them into confusing periods like the Silurian, Carboniferous, and Jurassic, it would be much better if geologists used this time scale when talking to journalists:
Precambrian and Palaeozoic = The Pre-Dinosaur Period
Mesozoic = The Syn-Dinosaur Period (or perhaps just the Dinosaur Period)
Cainozoic and the modern day = The Post-Dinosaur Period
Hence, if something exciting is found in Cambrian rocks and the press are baffled as to how to use dinosaurs in their report (everyone of course knowing that dinosaurs are the only fossils worth studying) now they can say, "these fossils, from the Pre-Dinosaur Period of geological time, were probably proto-dinosaurs, even though they lived in the sea and don't have scales, teeth, claws, legs or even eyes. There's no evidence for this interpretation, but it is scientific fact."
Rather than having those pesky Palaeozoic, Mesozoic and Cainozoic eras, and further subdividing them into confusing periods like the Silurian, Carboniferous, and Jurassic, it would be much better if geologists used this time scale when talking to journalists:
Precambrian and Palaeozoic = The Pre-Dinosaur Period
Mesozoic = The Syn-Dinosaur Period (or perhaps just the Dinosaur Period)
Cainozoic and the modern day = The Post-Dinosaur Period
Hence, if something exciting is found in Cambrian rocks and the press are baffled as to how to use dinosaurs in their report (everyone of course knowing that dinosaurs are the only fossils worth studying) now they can say, "these fossils, from the Pre-Dinosaur Period of geological time, were probably proto-dinosaurs, even though they lived in the sea and don't have scales, teeth, claws, legs or even eyes. There's no evidence for this interpretation, but it is scientific fact."
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