Dinosaur embryos...on the MOOOOOON!

[muriel_volestrangler]

On the web at researchgate.net , which indicates a serious problem - you get proper scientific journals there too.

I’m a guy who knows his way around an embryo, and is also knowledgeable about evolution, and to a lesser degree am interested in space exploration, so this article title is major league clickbait to me: Dinosaur eggs with fossilized embryos on the Moon. Awesome!



...

Huh. There’s a crater there with some clutter in it. Is that it? It’s hard to tell, especially since the authors defy convention and don’t include scale bars in their images. But then you have to realize that the LROC camera has a best resolution of 0.5m per pixel, look at the number of pixels in the “embryo,” and it’s suddenly clear: that “egg” is about 20km across. It’s a heavily processed and pseudocolored photo of a lunar crater!
...
He’s got a substantial collection of articles, all published in cheap-ass pay-to-play journals, with many interesting claims based entirely on mangling and misinterpreting NASA images. For example, he thinks he has found a Hindu temple on the Moon.

https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2023/09/28/dinosaur-embryoson-the-moooooon/

(link is to freethoughtblog's PDF copy of the farce, so you're not giving the culprits clicks if you link to it)
This pay-to-play journal is the "New York Science Journal", from Marsland Press, which appears to have been peddling bullshit for quite a few years - from 2015:

In a slight twist, one of the companies on Beall’s list of rogues, Marsland Press, offers the opportunity to publish in a journal called Nature and Science. That means a researcher could legitimately claim to have published “in Nature and Science,” making it sound, if you don’t look closely, as though he or she had landed a spot in two of the world’s most prestigious journals. Beall also claims to have found Russian firms that, like those described by The Economist in China, will write and place scientific papers for a fee.

https://www.statnews.com/2015/11/19/fraudsters-academics-journals/

But why does researchgate.net give them space?