Financial Fundamentals: New facts about a dinosaur extinction

From Shreveport Times:  Financial Fundamentals: New facts about a dinosaur extinction

What do you know about the brontosaurus? If you are like I am, you remember it, along with the tyrannosaurus rex, stegosaurus and triceratops, as one of the four major dinosaurs that you learned about in school. The brontosaurus was a giant, with a massive body, long neck and very small head. It stood approximately 50 feet tall and was about 85 feet in length. In 1989, the U.S. Postal Service included the brontosaurus as one of four dinosaurs it commemorated in stamps that year. What do you know about its extinction?
If you think I'm talking about the various theories on how all dinosaurs became extinct, think again. I'm actually referring to the fact that scientists now will tell you that the brontosaurus never existed. Surprisingly, that isn't a new idea, even if you just heard about it. Paleontologist Elmer Riggs first argued that the skeletal remains of the brontosaurs was actually a misidentified Apatosaurus in 1903. (That's 86 years prior to being placed on the U.S. stamp.) Today, most adults remember the brontosaurs, but grade school children and paleontologists are the ones most likely to know that the brontosaurs never actually existed.
In his fascinating book The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know has an Expiration Date, Samuel Arbesman uses the story of the brontosaurus to illustrate how knowledge changes over time. He also points out that sometimes old facts are hard to replace and new information often is slow to be disseminated or accepted.
Do you know if it is OK to drink red wine, how many eggs are safe to eat, and whether caffeine is actually good for you? Do you remember when your answers were different than today? New information is coming to us at an accelerated rate and keeping abreast is important if you want to make good decisions. This is important in most industries, because it means that the things professionals learned when they were getting started might be very different from what we know to be true today. This holds true in professions such as medicine, law, accounting and certainly in financial services.