Drosophila can't catch a break.  Even Nature, which never runs a press release about one of its studies without putting 'prestigious' in front of its name, fell prey to a glaring error regarding the little critter, as seen on the cover of Nature Methods.

The problem?  The cover attached, presumably, to "Tools for Drosophila" article is  not actually Drosophila.

No big deal since even the Entomological Society of America has gotten it wrong quite often and a lot of the knuckleheads jumping on Sarah Palin for her 'America first' approach to science funding also didn't know that Drosophila melanogaster is not a fruit fly.



But what makes Nature Methods getting it wrong poignant is that I first saw it courtesy of Mike Eisen, founder of PLoS (and fellow panelist at the AAAS meeting in August which you all should attend) who got some grief from Henry Gee at Nature because the naming of Darwinius masillae was done without being placed in a print publication - you know, like the mega-corporation print journal that employs Gee.

Mike wrote on Facebook:

considering how much shit Henry Gee gave PLoS for not technically satisfying the naming conventions for Darwinius, I'll take every sucker punch i can get

Science, like anything else, can be a dog fight (can we say dog fight these days?   America has discovered that it can tolerate almost anything from its celebrities/athletes - illegitimate kids,alcohol,drugs,infidelity, bad manners,rehab - except dog fighting, which is instant shunning) and Gee making that point was technically correct but also slyly torpedoing a competitor.   The subtext:  publish in PLoS and your name won't count so you'd better give Nature the first crack at it.

And that kind of 'instilling doubt' tactic works, as seen in this comment by Larry Witmer on Iconocast:

You’re absolutely right, Martin. Henry Gee (Nature) also has pointed to Article 8.6 (in a Facebook entry) and posted the link to the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature, for those that want to check out the rules: http://www.iczn.org/iczn/index.jsp. Article 8.6 is in Chapter 3. 
...
I’m part of a group that had been looking at PLoS ONE as a potential venue for our manuscript (mostly because of the ability to include more graphics and movies), but we decided against it for precisely this reason. Would the new name be valid?

So errors like this in a print publication that shows contempt for online science writing and open access peer review are pretty darn funny.   The issue with Darwinius was cleared up, I might add, but defer you to Carl Zimmer for the details.

Hey, at least they didn't call it a fruit fly, right?    That's what I thought too.   But Chris Patil points out the authors do that also, on p. 451.  You'd think smart editors like they have at Nature would catch those errors but maybe they're best at pointing out flaws in competitors.