Smithsonian Is Not Smarter than 5th Grader
Staff at the world-renowned Smithsonian Institute Museum of Natural History are red-faced after a 5th grader on a family trip pointed out a mistake that’s been there for nearly 30 years.
Kenton Stufflebeam, an 11-year-old from Michigan, noticed a bold notation in the museum’s Tower of Time display that mistakenly identified the Precambrian as an era. The Precambrian is a dimensionless unit of time encompassing all the time between the beginning of Earth and the beginning of the Cambrian period of geologic time.
Yeah, I so knew all that info before I Googled. Young Stufflebeam told the Kalamazoo Gazette his teacher almost made the same mistake in earth science class. Last week the museum sent the Kenton a letter acknowledging that he was correct. However, the museum addressed the letter to Kenton Slufflebeam of Allegeny.
Maybe they should put Kenton in charge of fact checking, that is, if Jeff Foxworthy hasn’t already hired him.
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