My bullshit detector is going off big time here: a popsci article citing another popsci article on phys.org, which cites the original paper but with a broken DOI link, and the original paper being published in what looks like a really crappy journal, whose publisher is on Beall's list of predatory publishers.
Maaaybe the science is good, I don't know since I can't find the paper. But if it's good science, and this is a new and cool result, why is it published in a really crappy journal?
Edit: as itcrowd below says, and the paper conclusions also state, this study only confirms the dating of these remains. The first paper giving this dating is from 2014. Otherwise the paper looks like decent science, although I'm not a paleontologist. Publishing non-novel results is very difficult, and I now believe this is the reason for the choice of journal.
I know the title says that this fossil confirms that the species were alive much later than anticipated, but it is not quite clear from the text of the article on Syracuse (or I misread?) that there was an earlier discovery of this species [with the same young age]. Below are the relevant passages from the scientific article.
From the discussion:
> Earlier, a series of the same young radiocarbon dates was obtained by our colleagues from Ekaterinburg
(Kosintsev, 2014) on the bones of elasmotheriums from localities southwest of the West Siberian Plain.
From the conclusion:
> Our study following the data by Kosintsev (2014) confirmed the longer existence of Elasmotherium sibiricum within the territory of the West Siberian Plain.
Sorry, my post might not have been clear enough. What I meant is that (Kosintev, 2014) already dated the species to ~30,000 years old two years ago. This new publication merely confirms that.
Are these fossils the origin of the unicorn myth? None of the articles I've stumbled across have an image of the actual fossil, I'm curious how similar it is to a horse skull. They were surely extinct well before the mythology, but their bones were around. The unicorn myth comes from the Indus Valley, which isn't too far away, relatively speaking.
Reminds me of the ancient Greeks turning elephant skulls on Crete into the cyclops.
I'm a little skeptical of this since it is not appearing in a major national publication such as the New York Times, a peer-reviewed journal such as Nature, or a well-respected blog such as Laelaps. Also, it is too close to April Fools Day to be certain it was mean to be taken seriously.
Maaaybe the science is good, I don't know since I can't find the paper. But if it's good science, and this is a new and cool result, why is it published in a really crappy journal?
Edit: as itcrowd below says, and the paper conclusions also state, this study only confirms the dating of these remains. The first paper giving this dating is from 2014. Otherwise the paper looks like decent science, although I'm not a paleontologist. Publishing non-novel results is very difficult, and I now believe this is the reason for the choice of journal.