Often, I am accused of misrepresenting the facts on the use of Haeckel's work. This proposed topic is to help clarify the issue, and hopefully see it resolved.
My point here is that Haeckel's diagrams were relied on by evos in their studies, research, textbooks and peer-reviewed work, at least until 1997. The topic is thus very narrowly defined in order to try to get some resolutions on this one point.
This is taken from a 1997 peer-review study by an evo.
Another point to emerge from this study is the considerable
inaccuracy of Haeckel’s famous figures. These
drawings are still widely reproduced in textbooks and review
articles, and continue to exert a significant influence
on the development of ideas in this field (Wolpert 1991;
Alberts et al. 1994; Duboule 1994).
MK Rich Ardson - MK Blog Rich
Richardson claims Haeckel's drawings up to 1997 exerted a significant influence "in this field" of scientific research, not just for textbooks, but that evos took the diagrams as accurate in peer-reviewed article as well.
It's not just that the textbooks were out of date, but evos themselves were wrong here. The textbooks were actually in agreement with mainstream idea in that field.