A Fox News story has caused an eruption among volcanic bloggers (eruption – volcanoes – geddit?), described by one as an “aneurysm-inducing travesty”.

The Knight Science Journalism Tracker says the Fox story’s mistake is “just one, big, staring-like-the-socket-of-an-old-skull scary boner of an error”.

The story is based on a paper that came out in the journal Environmental Science and Technology suggesting that the reason why Xuan Wei County, Yunnan Province, China has unusually high rates of lung cancer in non-smokers is because of the mining of coal that formed in the upper Permian – around 300 to 250 million years ago. This coal contains an unusually high amount of quartz, which holds within it small grains of silica that have been associated with lung cancer when they combine with volatile organic matter.

So what exactly did Fox get wrong to deserve such riticism? Their story’s headline “Cataclysm That Killed Dinos Still Taking Lives Today,” explains part of it: The Fox story claims that the dinosaurs were roaming the planet some time before they’d actually evolved (dinosaurs didn’t arrive until after the Permian, and were probably made extinct in the Cretaceous- Tertiarty mass extinction event). And those dinos were killed off by coal-erupting volcanoes.

Cue heavy snorting from volcanologists here, here and here.

Image: Alamy