how is it depressing? that seems a tad strong. Maybe disappointment is the correct feeling

Why? Calling a reasonable thing grim without any follow-up isn’t the hallmark of a good comment either.

It is not remotely reasonable to ask "but why didn't he feed it to ChatGPT?". It is pretty silly to assume that ChatGPT should always be consulted.

I understand this is more about the process than the result, but note that: a) his result is completely wrong, he identifies a living land snail as the 100+MYa fossil; b) a conversation with Claude helps with some decent knowledge and provides a few possible candidates, that can be then double checked. c) Claude could have talked the author out of trying to identify a Jurassic fossil against a database of living species.

It's a good starting place. As an analogy imagine someone wanted to look up the definition of a word. If someone wanted to know the definition and they went out and crawled the entire internet, built an LLM, and then asked it for the definition you would wonder why they didn't check an existing dictionary first. I wouldn't consider it silly at all to always check a dictionary or existing LLM first when you want to know the definition of a word.

Wanting to know the definition of a word is not an original problem. Similarly wanting to know what's in an image is not a new problem either.