Site your f^*#ing sources!

There is a reason that National Geographic is not considered a scintific journal; that reason is accountability. They don't have any. If they say something that isn't true, it's okay because they're just a magazine and no longer the Journal of the National Geographic Society. Following a link about the new archaeopteryx mentioned below, I was eventually brought to an article about communication in Cassowaries. For a 7th grader, this would have been a decent article. But I'm not a 7'th grader, I didn't go to Nat Geo for kids, I expect better. Three things particularly bothered me about the article. First of all, it was unnecessarily tied to dinosaurs, as though research about the world's largest forest bird wasn't interesting enough on its own. A dinosaur reference might have been tolerable if it were brief, but instead the whole article was geared to drawing a link between the two subjects, even throwing in the ubiquitious Jurassic Park references. If I were an ornithologist, I'd be kind of ticked off at Nat Geo for making my very difficult research sound invalid as its own topic.
Second, the author botched an explanation of how primitive rhatites (the group that cassowaries belong to) realy are, stating that "they are thought to have more in common with dinosaurs than most other birds." That isn't true. All modern thoughts about relatedness are based on shared commonalities. If a group of birds had more in common with dinosaurs than other birds, then they'd be lumped in with dinosaurs. There are alot of features which separate all birds (including rheatites) from the dinosaurs. Rheatites are secondarily flighless, one of many groups of birds to go that route through the ages. In fact, the tinamous (the closest relative of rheatites) flies and even migrates hundredss of miles anually despite being worse on the wing than a chicken. Resemblance to dinosaurs is superficial. The things that make them primitive are characters of the palate and braincase, not long legs and short arms.
The third thing that bothers me is that the author claims that cassowaries have claws on their wings. I'd never heard that before so I did an extensive google search on the subject. The closest I came was a reference about claws on the digits of some South American Rheas. I might have been more willing to believe the Nat Geo writer if perhaps he had sited his source for the information. Throughout high school and university we're browbeaten with the idea that not siting a source is plagerism; unless of course it's common knowledge. But then, National Geographic is not an academic press. They don't have acountability to either the people that they take information from, or spoon feed that information to.