 Imagine that you are a Eurypterid, a sea scorpion, one of the prehistoric beasties on the screen here. You're feeling pretty pleased with yourself. And why wouldn't you? With your terrible claws, compound eyes, and body sizes ranging up to two and a half meters in length, you made for a deadly predator, ruling the world's waters over 240 million years ago. In the present day, you are the subject of considerable scientific interest. Paleontologists studying the history of life learn how you're among the first creatures to walk on land, how you may have propelled an evolutionary arms race shaping the body plan from which all modern vertebrates, including humans, are based, and from a wider perspective, studying the demise of the Eurypterids and so many of their peers at the end of the Permian period, helped scientists build a chilling picture of what can happen in a world where greenhouse gases are allowed to rise unchecked. Something of great relevance today. Oh, Eurypterids, what the future can learn from you? Imagine your indignation then when you realize the tales you have to tell are not being heard. In the New York Times, for example, that bastion of journalism, Eurypterids have only peered three times in the last 30 years. The same goes for so many other prehistoric species with interesting and relevant stories to tell. Of course, you know who's to blame. It's those fatuous dinosaurs. Despite being of little scientific relevance and no more cool than you, they have appeared hundreds of times in the paper over the same period. They even appear in dozens of stories that have absolutely nothing to do with them. This is science journalism's dyno mania, an unparalleled fascination with a single topic which has the potential to displace other science from the news. Now, you'd think that such a singular and problematic phenomenon would have attracted the attention of science communication researchers, and yet it goes largely overlooked. Why? Because over two-thirds of science communication studies focus on the communication of just three disciplines, medicine, human biology, and climate science. Almost everything else gets generalized. And this is where my research comes in. Using paleontology as an example, my thesis aims to highlight the importance of acknowledging and appreciating these discipline level quirks in the way that science is reported. I am using an inductive, mixed methods approach with both news text analyses and interviews with media and science professionals. I've already identified some issues of interest. Of course, there's dyno mania, but we also see a similar bias towards stories on early hominins, one which oddly has not been challenged in the same way by the scientific community. Story selection seems to be based on an atypical set of news values, rating, for example, superlative-ness and references to elite fossils over more conventional selection criteria, such as proximity or numerical threshold. At the same time, the increasingly simplified framing of paleontological stories resonates with broader theories on the popularization of news, but causing to question recent assertions that science journalism has entered a new age of critical and engaged reporting. Public engagement with science is on the decline at a time when we need it more than ever. I believe passionately in improving the communication of science, and I hope that my research will add to the wider picture we need to achieve this. For paleontologists and for the Eryctorids. Thank you. APPLAUSE