Josie Ford
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Big lizard, big page
The bigger the reptile, the longer its Wikipedia entry. So finds ecologist Ashkaan Fahimipour at Florida Atlantic University. He scraped all the Wikipedia pages about reptiles, then used this dataset to produce a graph mapping the relationship between each reptile’s body mass and the length of its page. As he explained on Bluesky: “Reptiles with longer Wikipedia pages tend to be bigger. The relationship is a power law with exponent = 0.85.”
Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. Conservationists will tell anyone who will listen that we are biased towards more “charismatic” animals, which is why conservation campaigns tend to feature photos of polar bears and pandas. Charismatic animals tend to be larger, as shown by a 2020 study that found people rated larger animals as more charismatic on the whole.
