“Even with well-preserved species, you can get terrific differences in interpretation.”
“They’re all looking at the same fossils and the same features,” says Roy Plotnick, an invertebrate paleontologist at the University of Illinois Chicago. But something as simple as orientation can affect the interpretation of a fossil. Plotnick is working on a study about a fossil that was classified as a jellyfish for almost 50 years; upon flipping it upside down, he realized it’s actually a sea anemone.
“You need to come up with a frame of reference, some sort of interpretive framework, which is based on what you see,” Whalen says. For instance, the preserved suckers allowed him to identifyas a cephalopod. “Once you’ve gotten that, then you can start to focus on interpreting the different structures under that framework.”
Ultimately, the strength of the interpretation depends on how reasonable it is. “I usually use the phrase: What is consistent with the evidence that we have?” Plotnick says.
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